loose ends

Details tended to in the course of executing the wishes and dictates of my deceased mother are numerous, edifying, occasionally happy, regretful, poignant and often disturbing. The direction in her will, and her voice heard before the event, takes me, her Executor, back, and forward. Yesterday, sixty-eight days from the morning of discovering that Mother and I wouldn’t speak with each other again, nor raise a glass, I repaired the trim around her front door. The policeman and I damaged it to get to her, although it wasn’t necessary. In those awful first minutes I had forgotten that a key to the storm door was in a hidden location. It had been there, unneeded, for years.

Her memorial was the hardest and most satisfying thing to accomplish. The obituary was a difficult and fulfilling exercise too. She left no written direction on either of those subjects and her guidance before her death was to do nothing. Whenever she mentioned it, which was often in her later years, I listened but never agreed. A woman who had been through what she had and who had done so much for me would not pass unnoticed if I could help it.

Today, ownership of her twenty-five year old Buick will transfer to a gentleman coming from Michigan, 850 miles away. Either my eBay ad was perfect or the car of value well beyond my understanding. Preparing it for sale reminded me of the trips made with her in it. Her love for the car and her obsession with its care and service makes me want to keep it. But I can’t. Continuing to hold the steering wheel that she gripped for so long would have been nice.

Preparing her house for sale, the place where she lived alone for nearly twenty years, is something I want to finish and dread the completion of, at the same time. I asked her to sell it so that I could build a house for her next to mine but she didn’t want to. That rejection, accepted and understood at the time, troubles me now. Her preferred isolation was a factor in the tragedy.

There are few, but each of her accounts require resolution and closure, actions and terms with both business and emotional purpose. Telling strangers why I’m calling invokes their sympathy, which is always offered in a businesslike, although not impersonal manner. It almost always seems genuine. Hearing from others that they are sorry for my loss is never unwelcome. Its one of the benefits of tending to Mother’s affairs.

In our state an estate can’t be closed for eight months. The time is needed for anyone with an interest to intervene and collect what they are owed. But no one has a reason to intervene in Mother’s estate. One of her primary concerns, her entire adult life, was to owe nothing, and to complete every transaction honorably and completely. Her sons live according to that example and that’s a benefit to them and their associations. It’s a requirement that made Mother very risk averse, which at various times was either a benefit or detriment.

Cleaning her carpets, pressure washing her house and the garage floor, trimming the bushes, disposing of packaging and washing her car are among the things I’ve done since she passed away and a few are things I did before that awful day. Doing them now, without looking forward to her company, makes me supremely sorry she’s gone but I’m also pleased to lay my hands on the surfaces, papers and other material objects of her world.

These things that she held are being dispersed, as her ashes will be. The traces of her existence are being stored or erased by me, her son and “Executor”, which I’ve found to be a noble title.