It has been six months since my mom died. SIX MONTHS. I feel like that much time can’t have possibly passed already. And yet, in that time, we’ve sold her house, I moved into my own house, and have completed almost all repairs.
Initial Downtime
All of this started with significant downtime on my part. For about three months after Mom’s death in May, I didn’t do much else except watch movies and read books. I didn’t have the energy to get much else done or socialize, and frankly, it was a very nice time of rest. Every now and then, I would try to move a few things to my own house but I just couldn’t manage to put much effort towards it. The mental shift from living in Mom’s house to moving back into my own just seemed too huge for me to wrap my mind around.
Grief Support Group
In late August, I started attending a support group for those grieving the death of a loved one called GriefShare. It’s a little hokey (and very Christian/religious) but it really helped me get out of the house! I wasn’t relating very well to regular folks living their regular lives and talking about regular things. GriefShare gave me a space to speak to others in the same emotional language as my own.
Ultimately, over the 13-week course, I was able to work through a lot of emotions about Mom’s death and return (more or less) to a normal life. Life will never be the same but, you know, at least I can talk to regular people again.
Selling and Moving
We put Mom’s house on the market in mid-July and accepted an offer in late August. I had already accepted an opportunity to housesit in Florida that started at the beginning of September. Due to the timing of those two events, I ended up having only 5-6 days to choose what of my mother’s belongings I wanted to keep and completely move out of her house. We accepted the offer on Sunday and I was leaving the following Saturday.
Every night, I would pack a load of stuff into my little Honda Civic, then every day after work, I would take it to my house and unload it, then back to Mom’s house to pack another load. Remember, I had sold almost everything I owned before moving into Mom’s house, so I had to pick out the minimum of what I needed in my own house while I do repairs, plus anything I wanted to keep for sentimental value. I had already decided on the big things but there were innumerable small decisions to make as well. The kitchen was the worst! In short, I ended up moving my whole life in 5 days all by myself.
That wrench from avoiding life by watching movies alone in my Mom’s half-empty house to sudden action–moving everything out in less than a week–was the most traumatic part of my life post-Mom. I wasn’t ready to go but I had to do it anyway.
A Week in Gainsville
Then I spent a week in Florida! Right when Hurricane Dorian was bearing down on the southeast coast, I drove down to be with a friend’s cat while she was away. While I hung out with said precious cat, my family moved the big furniture items I couldn’t fit in my car, along with most of the rest of the furniture left in the house to their respective homes. And it gave me a week to breathe between the stressful 5-day move and all the work at my own house.
I had a great week with Milo the cat, exploring Gainesville, and generally watching movies and reading books as I had been doing. When I left, I knew I was heading back into my own house, by myself, with a ton of work ahead of me. I’m not going to lie, there may have been an excessive amount of crying and cat-hugging.
House Work
When I did get back, I faced a house that had been left empty for six months. It looked abandoned and filthy with an overgrown yard and a moldy basement. When moving in my stuff, I had just thrown boxes in the house. The furniture moved in my absence had been put in the appropriate rooms but not anywhere particular. The next few weeks I spent putting everything away and going through it a little better than I had during the 5-day move. Then I cleaned EVERY SINGLE SURFACE, going room by room, even down to wiping down almost every interior wall and washing all the windows. When I was done with the inside, I moved outside and weeded the yard and planted lots of stuff that I hope will look nice someday.
During all that, I’ve had people come in and completely gut and redo my damp basement, I had new gutters put on the house and a french drain dug in the backyard. I’ve had the exterior of the house painted, bought a new front door and re-stained the deck. I still have a few things left to do, but in all, I’ve done about $11,000 worth of improvements to the house (which is basically all the money I earned renting it. Arg.)
Mom’s House
While I was dealing with my own house, my sister dealt with getting everything out of our mother’s. I am really extremely lucky and grateful that she was there to deal with Mom’s house so I could be free to deal with mine. She sold or otherwise found homes for everything that we couldn’t take and she and my sister-in-law cleaned the whole house before we handed it over to the new owners. We signed the paperwork for the sale of Mom’s house on October 1st.
And to be honest, because of my sisters, none of this was really that traumatic. The most stressful event was having to move out of Mom’s house so quickly, which could have been avoided to some extent by my working on my own house and moving more stuff beforehand. I just couldn’t do it at the time. I HATED being away from Mom’s house, from the space she occupied, from among her things. And I cherish the time I got to live there, even after she was gone.
Maybe it was better to rip the bandaid off quickly, get the hardest transition over in less than a week and then have the blessing to spend a week in Florida licking my wounds. All that to say, I’m using the word “traumatic” lightly here. It was stressful. Perhaps it could have been easier. It certainly could have been much worse. I am very grateful to have my family, a house to move into, and money to renovate. I’m definitely not stuck.
Now and the Future
While I finish up some of my home improvements, I have started one of two projects that I want to complete before I start traveling. I took all of Mom’s vinyl records and a chunk of her cassette tapes and have been digitizing them to MP3 files. Between her considerable vinyl collection plus some of my own and some I got from my sister, I have a stack almost five feet high to get through! I’ve already finished all the Christmas tapes and records and it goes a lot more quickly than I thought it would so hopefully I will have that all completed in a couple of months.
While I’m digitizing records, I can work on my second project, which is to put all my old photos into photo albums. I’ve always had boxes of printed photos to put into albums (from ages ago when you did that sort of thing.) Now’s my chance to finally get that done.
Once those projects are finished and the money from Mom’s estate is settled, I plan to start traveling full time. Just this weekend, I signed up for Trusted Housesitters and plan to start finding housesits around the world in the near future. Since I’m not really sure where I want to go first, housesitting wherever I can find work feels like a decent way to start out. And a way to rest and find time to work on the blog and other money-making ventures I have in mind.
Everything will be okay.
Be First to Comment