Endings

I met with a couple ladies yesterday about having an estate sale at my mother's house.  I've gone through just about everything and taken what I wanted, mostly fabrics and trims for dolls and a few dolls and accessories.  But there is so much more that needs to be sold.  We had a nice chat.  I showed them what was there and they agreed to hold a sale.  They will organize and sort and hold the sale for a percentage of the profits.  I will get the job done.  I have been anticipating this for quite a while and thought I would be elated that the task was passing to someone else.  But instead I just felt profound sadness.  First, a panicky thought that I would be turning everything over to these ladies and no longer able to keep any of it.  Then, just an overwhelming sense of the end of an era.  That these things are my last tangible connection with my mother.  I said goodbye to the women after promising to get back to them next week and went back in the house and cried.

A number of years ago a good friend passed away.  Before she died, she had invited me over to her home to pick out a doll as a remembrance of her.  She was selling the doll, not giving it away, but selling it to me at a very low cost.  I'm sure she knew I couldn't afford much at the time and wanted me to have it.  After her funeral her daughter called me demanding the doll back.  I was rather shocked, but since I had paid for it (maybe that was the reason her mother "sold" it rather than just giving it away) I refused.  The friend's husband called explaining his daughter was trying to hold on to her mother by keeping all her things and to ignore the request since she would eventually figure out that the things were not her mother and that his wife had specifically wanted me to have the doll.  I couldn't really understand it all at the time, but I certainly did last night. 

I can't keep everything of my mother's, nor would I want to.  Most of the things I have no emotional attachment to.  But it's easier to forget for a little while that she's gone when you can go to her house and handle all her things and wonder why she bought this or that.  In a couple weeks everything will be gone.  I can see that I need to sort things out a little more.  That I need to go through a few more chests and boxes to make sure that everything we want to keep we have.  My brothers need to make a pass through everything also.  We need to get rid of the non-working TV and the lift chair and bring in the furniture we want to sell.  But within a few weeks this task will be finished.  I will be both happy and sad.

~Jane