The Death of a Mother Part Two: Cleaning and Selling the House

My mother's house was her largest asset. After she died, we spent four months cleaning it out; it sold in one day. 

First, we had to dispose of my Mom and Dad's furniture. With five children to raise and send to school, they had settled for serviceable furniture, nothing fancy. I was my mother' executor. My wife and I invited my siblings and their families and other relatives to come and see if there was anything they wanted. For what ultimately remained, I opted to donate it to charitable organizations. 

I learned that the Salvation Army isn't the organization from the stage musical Guys and Dolls or the movies. My previous contact with the group had been with these portrayals and various individuals in Santa Claus suits ringing a bell in front of a large bucket. The earliest pickup appointment we could get was three weeks away, and when the two finally men came, they walked around, noticed a scratch on the dining room table and the china cabinet and said they could only accept furniture that was "show-room ready." I thought from their ads they were donating furniture to the needy, and here they were wanting unused furniture to sell in their show rooms. I told them they should send out an inspection team first and not make us wait weeks to be rejected. I was so upset at the wasted time I ordered them out. We ultimately found a nonprofit named Community Forklift that took everything--although they had a no-stairs policy so we had to rely on myself, my brother and one of my late brother's sons to haul the beds and dressers downstairs. Other items--bags and bags of clothes and popular novels--went to Northwest Children's Outreach Donations, which had an easy access drop-off.

Second, we learned that no one would take Mom's hospital bed--which was electric and had cost several thousand dollars--presumably for fear of contagion, even though she had no contagious disease. One of our contractors needed one for his mother, so it worked out. 

Third, my Dad, an attorney, and my Mom, an English teacher had amassed a mass of books, for their own careers and for their children's learning. We had family members go through them. From what was left, we thought that we would donate literary novels and nonfictions to libraries and try to sell books Mom and Dad really prized. My Dad purchased the Book of the Year every year from 1951 to his death in 1968 and the Book of Knowledge annuals for the same period. He bought an Encyclopedia Britannia that all of his children used as THE resource through high school. No one wanted the two annuals, so they went to the Montgomery County (Md.) Friends of the Library. The Encyclopedia, which was copyrighted 1937, before a polio vaccine was discovered and the internet was invented, went to the landfill. My Dad collected books about Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy and World War Two, as well as religious books about and by St. Thomas Aquinas and my Mom did the same for books by and about Thomas Merton. We brought some to a number of used book stores, none of which wanted them. Second Story Books in Washington, D.C. told me the problem was they were all hardbacks and that it is hard to sell hardbacks today. I actually thought that hardbacks, being more durable, were the better buy. Maybe, with the internet, no one buys books. The Kennedy, Lincoln and World War Two Books went to the Friends of the Library, and the religious books to the Washington Retreat House run by the Franciscan Sisters of Atonement.

Fourth, having dealt with the big things, dealing with the family things pulls you into a bubble between past and present, remembering the past and knowing what will happen. My Mom saved every bill she received after my Dad died 47 years ago, and we had to go through them one by one because sometimes letters and stock certificates were mixed in. My Dad saved every tooth each of his five children lost and every spelling test, along with first and second pairs of shoes. Outside of making a necklace of them, there was nothing to be done with the teeth. The spelling tests, the valentines, the birthday cards, aside from one or two, all had to go. Dad and Mom felt the promise for each of us so strongly. Much of it was fulfilled, but with sadness and heartache and right turns when we should have turned left, and also a few miracles, such as medical innovations that the 1937 Encyclopedia didn't mention. And we pray for more medical miracles to come.