My mother fell in love with the house I grew up in when she was a young girl, living on the next block over. The story has her going the long way to school just to pass by it. She was elated when the “For Sale” sign went up and devastated when the “Sold” sign was attached. Little did she know my grandmother had bought it for her. They had moved around a lot and with the house came a promise that they wouldn’t move anywhere else. My mother was stoic and stubborn and would not sell that house if her life depended on it.

My mother and father began building their family, but when my father felt that 5 children needed a bigger home, she wouldn’t hear of it. There was, of course, more to it than that. A job offer in another state and sharing the home with his mother-in-law added to the straws on the camel’s back, I’m sure. He decided not to stay, but my mother raised the 5 of us in the house she grew up in and was determined to keep it at all costs.

My mother had started to not feel good in December, and by mid-March, she was gone. It was all so sudden and unexpected that there were a lot of loose ends to tie up. She didn’t have a will and had never signed the house over to my brother, as she intended to. My mother didn’t raise her children to be stingy, so there was no worry about arguing over money. However, there was a big issue that needed to be dealt with, and none of us really wanted to deal with it. The House.

My mother was never the neatest person on the block. Just like the rest of us, she was a hard worker at work. As a lunch lady, she washed dishes and served food all day long. No one could reprimand a 77 year old woman for not wanting to do the dishes when she’d been doing them all day at work. My neice had over-run the house for years, would be kicked out, and then forgiven to come back and make more of a mess than before. I’m not just talking the beer cans and bottles strewn across the backyard. I am talking about junk barbeques that are rusted out and hardly useful, used once or twice, and left to rot and grow weeds around them. Items brought in from hauling literal junk out of abandoned homes from a job that she had for about a month. Other items left, some in boxes, from her U-Ship “career.” Items that were supposed to be delivered, I’m sure, but left in mom’s garage with no working door, exposed to elements and critters. She had attempted to pull a trailer into my mother’s backyard to live in but proceeded to tear the porch away from the house in the process. While the neighbors complained and she had to move the trailer, she never repaired the porch. And neither did my mother.

The house was not only filled with hoarded garbage, but there was also a rat infestation that was going on for God only knows how long. The basement windows were all broken in some fashion, so I’m sure that they’d been going in and out the same way the house cat was. There was no bathroom sink. And I’m not saying that the bathroom sink didn’t work. There wasn’t one at all. The sink broke, and the vanity fell apart. Rather than fix it, my mother had the sink thrown away, and she just dealt with the bathroom the way it was. The kitchen sink worked! My brother was supposed to come and help her. She was going to sign the house over to him, but he was proving no better than her when it came to keeping house. He attempted to fix the toilet in the upstairs bathroom. It leaked a lot, and before he realized it, the ceiling in the kitchen came down. You could see the dark and stained beams, the insulation was hanging down. He didn’t fix it. He didn’t call to have someone fix it. He just shrugged and went back to drinking and playing his video games.

So when Mom passed away, the house was still in her name. She had never made a will and thought that she had a lot more time to think about it. Her mother didn’t pass away until her 90s. We all thought that we had more time with her. There was still the house to deal with. The funeral director had looked at the 5 of us and asked who was going to be in charge. My 4 siblings all looked at me and said “She is.” I wasn’t surprised as this role is my natural standing in my family – the one who gets things done. I didn’t ask for the role, and I don’t have to go out of my way to fit into it. It is who I am. I was recommended to one lawyer, but I trusted my instincts and went with another. I was told that I needed to put the house up for sale and open an estate account to receive the funds. There were a few things standing in the way of getting those things done.

My oldest sister and my brother were both living in the house. My brother has a job, so I wasn’t that concerned about him finding a place and moving out. My sister, on the other hand, is not really all that capable of taking care of herself. She never had before – living with whoever she was dating, couch surfing, holeing up back at Mom’s. Once she had her alcohol withdrawl seizures and needed medical intervention, she’s not the same either. She couldn’t really keep a job or apartment before! How could she be expected to now, when she sometimes mistakes the show she’s watching for something that happened to her or someone she knows. She’ll even think that we can all enjoy the cheesecake that Rachel Ray is making on some cooking show! Not to mention the dumpster the house had become.

It really began moving when I got a call from the lawyer that the town’s mayor called him to find out what was happening with the house. I don’t know how they got the name of our lawyer, but I am assuming that it’s all public information. In any case, they were wanting to condemn the home if nothing was being done about it so I had to create a listing quickly, and send it to them to show that action was indeed taking place. If it was condemned, then we wouldn’t be able to sell it. We had one dumpster and filled that, but it dragged on as my siblings sorted through their memories and nostalgia. When I realized that no one was planning on doing any more clean up or removal, I had the house listed, and it quickly sold above the asking price. I could go into the details about the one sister who was causing problems, stealing the for sale sign and expecting me to pay the taxes on the house for 5 more years until she divorced her husband and had enough money to buy it herself. But it’s over now. I don’t need to go into all those details.

My brother waited until the last minute to move into a room in his friends house. I’m talking about 4am the day of the closing. My sister is currently in a hotel being paid for by us, to be reimbursed with her inheretance. The new owners have already started woeking on the house, putting in new windows and completely gutting the inside. I know about the inside because another sister saw that the door was open, went inside looking for a forgotten picture of our grandfather, and the new owner called me to say that while she was very nice, it’s not appreciated. Then he proceeded to proudly tell me about all the things that he’s already done, and all the things that he’s planning on doing.

My mother’s house is hers no longer. It feels strange to think that there isn’t a place that I can go to if things were to go south. I do have a friend who lives in the western part of my state who has told me that I will always have somewhere to go if I need to. He and his wife have started their own little family, and while I know that they both mean it from the bottoms of their hearts, I also recognize that they are not My Mom. Their house isn’t my Mom’s house. I wish that one of us kids could have kept it, but the taxes keep going up, the upkeep requires at least two incomes, and none of us had the money to buy the others out. Fixing the place alone would have bankrupted any one of us, without thinking about the cost of the taxes once they were reaccessed. The End of an Era.

A friend who heard that we had to sell said he felt like the town wouldn’t exist if someone from my family didn’t live in that house. As someone who lives in their van and used her mother’s address and for occasional parking, it feels strange to not have any connection to the town anymore. If I left the office and had no where in particular to go, I would often find my myself just heading towards my mom’s house just because. Even if I didn’t go inside, I would sit across the street and hang out there, feeling safer than just sitting on any old side street. No more of that, it’s over now.

There are a few loose ends that need to be tied up before I can say that it’s completely done. And there will always be my oldest sister to think about and deal with. I need to file my mothers taxes from the year before she passed and file the taxes for the estate once this year ends. I’ll need to distribute the funds from the sale and set up some sort of trust for my oldest sister because handing her a large check would be a dealth sentance, and highly immoral with the knowledge that I have of her. Of course, she needs to agree to it, but I’m sure that she won’t have a problem knowing that it’s for her housing. But other than that, we all need to say goodbye to our mother’s dream house and the home that we grew up in. I hope the new family enjoys it and I wish them well. The end of one era is the beginning of a new one. Much love to them in theirs.