My youngest sister came down from Chicago to help me with my mom's stuff. She is much more savvy about real estate and dealing with all the people and being nice when she is supposed to than I am. I work in construction for a reason. It is allowable to tell someone to go screw themselves if needed...trying to sell a house...not so much. So I have relinquished that responsibility to her capable hands. I know that she will do an excellent job, and I am grateful that she is willing to come all the way down here to help me with it.
Now, the selling of the house is not really that much cause for heartburn for me. It is just a house. Yes, it was my Mother's house, but it is not her. Without her it is a building, bricks and wood, and paint. Cold and silent. What is dragging me down is in order to actually sell the house, we must first empty it. Now, we are down to the nut cuttin' and this is where I am having a major problem. Kim has hired a woman to do an estate sale. This means that there are no less than three, and as many as six strangers in my mother's house. They are going through her things! They are sorting through her treasures, keeping this and tossing that out. I know that this has to be done, but it is killing me. I know this is what they do for a living, and that they are decent folks, but they are only concerned with the bottom line. They do not know how that little dish with the pixie on the lid got chipped, or that the crude ash tray they threw out was made in art class by her son, and carefully protected for over forty years. They don't care that all those hand thrown pottery vases were made by my mother, and how proud she was when she showed them to us thirty some years ago. They never listened to her tell the plants in her greenhouse that they'd better bloom or she'd throw them out in the garbage. They do not care, they can't afford to. They only value things for the profit they will bring, not the stories they tell. Of course, this is the way things have to be, and I understand, but I do not have to like it. They did not know her, and things are only things. God damn it. They are her things. That a kind, generous, wonderful person's entire life can be reduced to a glorified garage sale......
I am so *hurt*. I can tell you that nothing will make a competent adult feel more helpless than losing their mother. When my father died, I was sure that there couldn't be anything worse. I was wrong. This is worse. This is the woman who when I was born with a severe club foot told the doctor, "thank god she came to us so we can take care of her". The beautiful woman who held my hand through all my surgeries and made me believe that everything was going to be fine. She dried tears and healed hurts. Who will help heal this hurt?
There is no place to run and hide. You can't bury hurt like this. You can shove it aside, but it's always sitting there, like the homeless guy you walk by. You can avert your eyes, but you still know he's there. I know that this will get better. Everyone says it will, so it must, right? I guess that having people go through a person's whole life willy-nilly sticking prices on the things that she treasured is not as bad as some other things. Right now though, it feels like someone is twisting a knife in my heart. It means that no matter how much I wish it weren't true, she is gone. Forever. It is almost more than I can bear. Where do you go from there? I don't know.
