As if burying a parent is not bad enough…. it doesn’t end there! It has been a year and a half since our mother passed. My sister and I have been trying to clear out the home that was our parents. When she passed we knew it would be a difficult task to settle their estate and then the fake pandemic happened. The country shut down…and fear eroded the lives of many.
While we struggled to maintain our sanity through this period it also grossly delayed the obvious…the sale of the family home. After the first six months into the pandemic we decided it was time to go into the home and start sorting through the large house the memories from the miscellaneous.
The first few trips to the house brought days of eliminating things of no value. Pretty sure the sanitation workers were pretty aggravated with us as we filled up container after container of bags of paperwork and items we had deemed worthless or unusable. It was difficult throwing anything out as I almost felt like I was violating the house in someway but then I would hear this little voice in my head from my Dad “if you can’t use it throw it out”.
We tried having several yard sales that yielded very little because the pandemic had made most people afraid to leave their homes. The existing members of the family had already made their selections among the furniture, household items, paintings and photographs and yet there was still a lot in the house.
After over a year of trying in vain to sell items from the home, we had my sister’s church pastor to come in and make his selection of items for a church yard sale…..still there was a lot left. The balance we are still having to deal with. I have stored the valuable antiques while my sister has had the task to moving the balance to an unoccupied house of another family farm.
We now have a buyer for the house and that in itself has not been pleasant either but it is allowing us to move forward. After meeting with our attorney, we now have more clarity of the process and feel good moving toward the closing of the house in a few weeks.
In talking with family and friends who have been through this process we quickly found our experience not to be much different from theirs. There have been times when we sat in the house and cried and other times when we could not stop laughing at some silly something that we had found like a wooden doll kit in the garage!
As difficult as it has been we have moved past the grief into a period of acceptance and are planning the rest of our lives and respecting the memory of our parents.
Have a blessed day.
Through My Eyes 