Remains of a Life

I am struggling.

This is the situation: Mom died two years ago. Her husband (of six years) remained in her home. He died three weeks ago. Now I am tasked with going through her things and getting her house ready to put on the market. There’s only me and my sister, but she lives 900 miles away. I also have to deal with his kids who need to deal with their Dad’s stuff – which isn’t a lot, but which is integrated with everything else in the house. Today I came across some certificates with his name. Last week I found two unopened bottles of Listerine and an erection vacuum pump.

As I wade through her belongings, it is the older things that snag my emotions. A small duck figurine. A candle holder. Mom's parents’ framed marriage certificate dated 12/25/1916.  The hardest are her papers. She kept everything, organized, fortunately. But they tell the story of her life – and so much I didn’t know.

There is a notebook, jammed with papers, receipts, booklets from an annual conference she attended. Something to do with church, so she was paying her own way. All of her expenses are neatly listed: dinner - $7, metro - $2, plane ticket - $117, airport parking - $10. Ten dollars she spent on parking. It makes me cry. Why didn’t she ask me to take her to the airport? Was that during my years of being a bad daughter?

I feel myself filling with shame. Memories of things I did that surely hurt her feelings. Things I realize, that mightn’d have remained in her memory. Things that were washed away by the love of a mother. This is not to say we had an idyllic relationship. She was not the good-enough mother that I needed. But she was a lovely, kind woman, deserving of much.

Still, as a child, she was repulsive to me. As an adolescent, I blocked her out, protecting myself from the deprivation I felt. As a young adult, I avoided her, choosing to visit only when someone else – a buffer – was also present. But when, at 33, I moved back to the town where she lived, we began to relate as adults. We had similar interests, common values. I helped her; she helped me. We’d drink tea at three o’clock. I would pour and dispense sugar cubes. Our relationship had finally become civilized, and perhaps I had become a “good daughter.”

I am sobbing as I write this. Tears and snot running down my face. How does one reconcile the vast disparities of a relationship so charged with love and hate? 

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.  - Marcus Tullius Cicero