It’s been over six months since my mother died. The worst of the necessary things we had to do after she went have passed, I have helped arrange a Celebration of Life, divided up most of her property, dealt with my irritating step brother, kept the peace with my siblings.
All that is left is the sale of her house.
My siblings are eager to get it sold, off our hands, no emotional connection to it at all. Whereas I find it the most painful part of all this after-death business. A little miffed that they are so cavalier, I began to think about it. They never really lived in that house. They were off to college, European trips, busy with friends and starting new independent lives. When we moved to that house, I was still a kid in junior high.
It was in that house that I lived alone with my two parents, suspiciousof the decline in my father’s health. It was in that house that I survived the aftermath of his death, the shock and horror of his demise at forty-two. I also lived through the horrific death of two friends, survived the death-like grip of anger at my mother’s new single life. It is there that I coped and wilted while she vanished to New Zealand for a while. I experimented with marijuana and drugs in that house and had sex for the very first time there. I fled home to that house when college became intolerable.
None of this was part of my older siblings’ lives.
The house sale is different for each of us, but I have been surfing on waves of sadness.
Goodbye house.
Odds are you will be “a scraper” and all your bits and pieces will be ripped and smashed and tossed in the landfill. A new house will rise on the spot. One without the leaky basement, the metal window cranks that don’t work, the unusable fireplace, the rickety shed in back.
I hope though, that the ghosts of our dogs, Gus and Rollo, skitter invisibly around the alley, that the buzz of passionate human endeavor—the laughter and the tears—float somewhere above, going about their business; that my dad is still hiking to the top of the first ridge and inhaling the dry Colorado air.
All this happens as I have finished the first draft of my book about my life with my father. When the house sells and the book is finished in whatever form it will take, I think I am going to feel a burden lift. I’ve carried it around for far too long. When the house goes, it will be like when a kite string has broken and the colorful kite has slipped away into the distance.
Only I am the kite, and I will be set free.
Just Carrie 