Some Tears Shed

Today when we stopped at the mailbox after a full day of being with the kids and going to one of Tessa's gymnastic classes and having Chick-Fil-A for dinner, the last thing I expected to see was a fat envelope from the lawyer handling Mom's estate.

I waited until we woke up Cooper from the backseat and moved him and his suitcase, toybag, and packpack into the house to open the envelope.

In it were a letter from Bob, an accounting of the estate which would be submitted to the court, and an envelope for me to return the paper with my required signature.

Two things prompted the tears.

One was that the end is near for settling the estate, which means that the end is near for moving Mom out of our lives.  Maybe that sounds horrible, but the strain that she put on my life, Greta's life, and the lives of those around us for most of our adult lives will be over, once and for all.  There will be nothing hanging over our heads, no obligations to visit and be yelled at, no reminders of hurt feelings or sharp words or put downs or criticisms. No concern about the house and the care of it.  No running interference for a crashed truck or a subdivision neighbor who came out of nowhere to be friends with Mom or her giving money to a random guy who was selling pizzas to be delivered yet no pizza was ever seen.  No worries about her falling down the steps or driving willy-nilly on the streets of Wooster and having an accident, hurting someone (more than just running into a house, which she did with the truck).  No more concerns about her spending lots of money for groceries that she would never eat that would become spoiled food that she wouldn't let anyone throw out because it might be a little bitey but it was still good.  No all of that would be over and done.  And it made me sad.  Not because I wished we could still be berated and criticized and yelled at.  No.. but because that era was over.  My parents were both gone. Dead.  Buried. And their estate settled.

The other, and honestly the main reason I cried, was the paragraph at the end of Bob's letter.  He said this:

"I do want to thank you and Greta for all your cooperation and assistance throughout this estate proceeding.  I am involved in far too many estates where the family is not cooperative and it is such a pleasure dealing with families where that is not an issue.  I am sure your mother was very proud of both of you."

As I read that paragraph aloud to Gary first, then later on the phone to first Hilary and then Megan, I choked up on the last sentence.

Mom was never proud of us.  She always accused me of thinking I was better than everyone else, especially everyone in the family, because I had two degrees.  She mentioned often, most recently a year before she died, that she had to control me, that I fought her control, and that I had always been difficult. She reminded me the last time she was here at the house that my dad thought we lived in a dump. (I know that wasn't true because he loved coming here and was so excited about our new siding and the new sunroom and our landscaping and the renovations we had done over the years). She asked me what I had done wrong to make me leave West Central and go to Ivy Tech to teach.  She always found something wrong with each and every thing that I ever did - including marrying Gary  and the girls being picky eaters.  I know that Greta was chastised often also for many reasons - working at a church, for one. This isn't her post, so I won't share all of the things Mom had said to her to make her feel small, insignificant, and to lower her self-esteem.  Mom was good at that - lowering her daughters' self-esteem.  If she were proud of us, she never let us know it.

The other thing is that Bob thanked us for being so cooperative with him and with each other.  He mentioned that during one of our first meetings with him after Mom died.  Mom's mission for many years was to keep things stirred up between Greta and me.  She would tell me one thing, then tell Greta something else.  We have compared stories about a few events and found that she embellished her versions depending on whom she was speaking to and what she wanted us to hear. If she could keep us apart, not speaking to each other, and going only through her for news of each other, then she had the control over us.  And now Bob is thanking us for being so cooperative with him and with each other.

We pitched Mom's journals, most of them unread, but I did look at a few entries scattered through the years.  Many times when Mom was upset with us for one reason or another, such as being concerned about her falling down the steps, or taking a settlement on the crashed truck instead of letting her keep it, or if she thought we were stealing things out of the garage or the little barn, then she wrote that she was contacting her lawyer and preventing us from having any control over her whatsoever, having him change the locks, and taking us out of the will. She threatened Gary with taking him out of the will (and he wasn't even in it!).  When she was at Chapel Hill last spring, she always threatened Greta that she was going to call her lawyer and have him spring her from the nursing home and be sure that no one could keep her where she didn't want to be.  If she had really called Bob to do any of those things, either he had discounted her as a crazy old lady or he talked her out of it.  If she called him.  Which she probably didn't.  Empty threats.

And finally, she was so intent on no one getting any of HER money, none of which she would have had if Dad had not invested wisely and planned for their retirement. He also planned for her to receive benefits from the Navy after his death due to mesothelioma.  HER money was a result of HIS planning and HIS hard work.  She mentioned several times in the last few years of her life (and in the last months of entries in her journals) that she intended to spend as much of  her money as possible, mainly so we wouldn't get any of it. That didn't happen. And part of my tears were because Dad wanted us to receive what he had worked so hard for.  He did.

Tomorrow I will sign the paper and return it and soon the estate will be settled.

Bob - thank you for the last paragraph.  Even though I cried, even though I never felt like Mom was proud of either of us, I know that Dad was.  That is what counts.