After 25 years at the same job in a law firm, in April 2011, I was layed off after the firm, like so many other businesses, began to suffer in the floundering economy. After the shock wore off, I began to see this as a good thing. I would enjoy the summer off, perhaps explore other career choices, catch up on the long list of things I'd procrastinated on doing, and spend some time with my elderly mother who lived with us. Financially, we could manage for awhile. My husband seemed happy that I would be home. I began to see this unfortunate situation as a good thing and before I knew it, it became a blessing in disguise.
I went on a few excursions before it got too hot out, taking photographs and enjoying the weather. I bought some flowers and planted them in the garden and erected several birdfeeders around the property and deck where my mom and I were enjoying front row seats watching bluejays, cardinals and goldfinches flittering about the yard. Many mornings we enjoyed coffee on the deck, taking it all in, relaxing and chatting about nothing in particular, laughing over silly things. There were also times when we argued because she forgot to take her medicines or she skipped her medicines because she never told me she had run out or she would just do one of the countless things mothers do to make their children go insane. Sometimes I would just grab my camera and spend the day out of the home so she wouldn't drive me batty.
Just days after Mother's Day, my mother became extremely ill and was rushed to the hospital where she was admitted in renal distress. My mother was not one to take prudent care of herself and I could never figure out why. I had told my mother, since I was availabe, to make appointments so I could take her to the doctor and get checked for some of the complaints she'd been having, but for whatever reason, she didn't and then it reached crisis status. The following five to six weeks became a nightmare as my mother had one procedure after another and struggled to get back on her feet and make crucial decisions as to her future care and prospects. If I didn't sit with her all day, I took trips to and from the hospital 2 to 3 times a day to feed her and wait to meet with doctors, until she was moved to a rehabilitation center when I again took at least two trips a day caring for her. I could see she was not getting better and was shutting down emotionally. She kept telling me, "What will be will be. I'm 82 years of age, how long am I supposed to live?" She felt that her world was far behind her and that there was no place for her in this world which had become a constant complaint for her in recent years. She could not keep up with the everchanging technology. Hell, she still struggled with the television remote, sometimes picking it up and trying to dial out. When she returned to the hospital again after a week in rehab, I knew that she would never be coming home again. She was resigned, accepting of things, done with suffering, tired of living. Several days later, she was moved to hospice where she died only hours later as I sat beside her bedside. It was not the goodbye I had thought we would have. The day before, while still in ICU, they started the morphine and made arrangements to move her to hospice where I thought she would be for a few days at least. We sat together most of the day, watching HGTV, ooohing and ahhhing over lovely cottages in the French countryside. When I went to leave for the night, she got a horrified look on her face and I laughed, assuring her I'd be back in the morning. We said our love yous and I left. The next morning, a nurse called to remind me to meet with a hospice worker to sign papers and they would move her to hospice. I asked how she was and the nurse told me, "Unresponsive." I knew then that my lightweight Mom was now permanently gaga from the morphine, and would not be coming back, would never see me again, would never tell me again that she loved me. I was stunned. They moved her to hospice later in the day (I will never understand what took so long) and by 11:30 p.m., on Father's Day, my mother died.
I found myself amazed, for the first time in my life, how my bad fortune had actually been a blessing in disguise. Had I been working, I would not have spent the extra time with my mother before she became ill, nor would I have been available to sit bedside with her all those weeks, nor tend to her post mortem affairs. Suddenly, I was faced with the ardous task of going through 82 years of her belongings and orchestrate the removal of junk, carpet removal, home repairs and renovations that came with her passing, as well as sorting through her personal correspondence, sentimental personalty and the like while dealing with, and being part of , my personal grieving. While I have a brother, he resides out of state and would be of no assistance (or interest, it seemed).
The summer I thought I would be having never would happen. Everything had changed. After organizing and attending her memorial service where she was interred with my father in a niche at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC, I was faced with the enormous task of going through her things and distributing it, keeping it and/or trashing it. This was not to be an easy chore as my mother was a potential hoarder and would have been for sure were it not for the fact that the home she lived in was owned by me and my husband and she had acquired quite a treasure trove of both good stuff and total crap during her 82 years, which we would try to encourage her to dispose of regularly, but her collection of stuff was a constant revolving door.
My mother was a hoarder of magazines and catalogs. Her attempts to downsize would entail ripping out articles, recipes, or photographs of fashion or decor that she liked, and designating them to assigned bins. Sometimes. Sometimes they were mixed together in the wrong bins. And all of these bins were sometimes mixed together with other things. My mother was notorious for drafting letters to people and while finding these drafts, I had no idea if anyone ever received the final product. Some of the writings were never even addressed to anyone in particular, so I had no idea to whom she intended to send the letter. She would jot down things she'd read or heard that she thought was interesting or funny on scraps of paper. She was notorious for writing down a recipe, but wouldn't title it or include the directions, just a list of ingredients and upon review, I couldn't tell if it was a stew, soup or casserole. She loved fashion and had saved photographs of suits or outfits she liked, some of them dating back to the 1950s. My mother loved Chanel and imitation thereof. She loved epulets and frog closures.
My mother had an interesting, but somewhat tragic life. After the age of 9, she and her sister, four years her senior, went to live with a childless aunt and uncle after her father had suffered another "nervous breakdown." There was far more backstory to the event leading up to that shift in custody, but most of it my mother could never recall and her generation was not open about it and thus, our generation would never quite know the history. When her oldest sister (14 years older) passed, my mother exclaimed, "I can't believe she's gone. There's so much I wanted to ask her, but never did!" I thought, "You spoke to her every week, how could you have never asked her??" Her brother, who still lives, unfortunately has lost half his marbles and has only offered a "its rather complex" explanation as to the reasons behind the custody transfer. The aunt and uncle were well off, however, and my mother lived a rather charmed life while in their care which was up to the day she married my father.
My mother, who was very creative and artistic, spent a great deal of her adolescent years drawing fashion and designs. She longed to be a fashion designer, but instead chose to attend drama school after high school when her uncle said, "Fashion design? You don't even know how to sew!" While he certainly did not mean to crush her dreams, he failed to recognize her talents and instead, an avid admirer of film and Hollywood, she decided to attend drama school in New York. Upon graduation, she performed in off off broadway productions, touring the East Coast with a theater group for a brief time before deciding it was not the lifestyle she had imagined for herself. She decided to return home and marry her high school sweetheart, my father, in a beautiful wedding gown she personally designed. It was a shame my mother never followed her artistic talents, however, as life for her would have been far different and I think she would have done very well as a designer. She lived in a different world than the rest of us, the product of a her childhood experiences and the fantasy world she built around herself in order to cope with her pain and suffering. Whether it was from the movies she adored or her training in the theater, my mother spoke with an affectation, sounding much like she was appearing in a black and white film, but in reality, her she lived in a blue and white world. She loved all shades of blue and always decorated with blue and white designs. My whole childhood was spent in a blue and white home, even when aqua was a popular color in the 70s. Many of those household items she still had, tucked away if not on display. Half of my current home, specifically, the living room and formal dining room, were decorated with her things in her palette and used primarily by her while the rest of us enjoyed the family room with its warmer tones of an autumn-like palette. Needless to say, I was solely left to sort through all these things, from old playbills to Spode plates during the months following my mother's passing, a time that was beginning to feel like semi-retirement and not just unemployment.
Needless to say, with my mother's passing, our lives were changed. We no longer needed the large home we owned, nor would we be able to afford it for long without my earnings, so our focus became to ready the home with the intent to list it for sale as soon as the flegling market showed a glimmer of improvement while I stayed at home working around the home with thre renovations and improvements.
Thus the summer of 2011 that I thought I was going to have was not meant to be. Instead, it became a summer of mourning, a season of grief, but it also became clear that it was a period of change for me as I moved into the next stage of my life, a time of liberation, free from the demands of a stressful job, free from the burdens of caring for an elderly parent. Our children were all adults, although two still lived at home, so I was free to rediscover who I was to become from this point on. I was no longer a caretaker. My mother was a handful in many ways and had lived with me for the past 15 years. I was now free to move on and begin to plan out the rest of my own life, taking care of me and my husband, our home and planning a future where we hoped to eventually be alone for the first time in our married life.
One of the first things I did after sorting and purging through much of my mother's belongings was rearrange our kitchen cabinets, discarding items we never used, many of which were gadgets she had purchased (and never used). I looked at our dishes which were a mish mash of patterns and incomplete sets as a result of our integrated lives. I decided to buy a set of dishes, reflective of me and my taste. In all my adult years, I never owned my own dishes, none that I had ever picked out. Every dish I owned was a hand me down, even the dishes my husband brought with him that he acquired between his first marriage and ours. I purchased a set of glossy black pottery dishes which I could use every day or for a more formal dinner without having to use either of the second hand china patterns I had acquired second hand (one being inherited). I love my new dishes. Not just because they are versatile decoratively, but because they are mine. I packed up the mismatched Corelle and whatever else was in the cabinets and set them aside for the boys should they ever move out on their own.
The holidays approached and I was torn about how to handle them without my mother. I chose to do a casual Thanksgiving, but Christmas would be a more formal affair in her honor. My mother loved Christmas and always decorated for the holiday. My husband, a bit of a slob, would invariably spill and stain on every tablecloth we've ever used and I would argue with my mother that using a cloth tablecloth would only create more laundry and eventually, we stopped using one. While I didn't put up a Christmas tree since my living room was still piled up for another Good Will pick up, I did decorate with a few splashes of Christmas cheer and brought out my mother's Swedish Yule Goat, about the size of a medium dog, made of straw. I set the table with the inherited china and silverware (that took nearly two days to polish), and in my mother's honor, a beautiful red tablecloth (that my husband did, of course, spill on) with matching cloth napkins that I hugged with red reindeer napkin rings I'd bought. She would have been proud of me. I found her Swedish meatball recipe and made a batch as an appetizer. The holiday turned out to be quite lovely, as was the following wkend when I used another cloth, breaking in the New Year with my new black dishes.
With the holidays over, I am still in the purging and renovation process, beginning to emerge emotionally from my mourning period and embracing 2012 with a positive outlook, glad to see 2011 behind me and hoping that 2012 will allow me to have the Summer of Me I was expecting to have last year, maybe even better than the one I had anticipated. And eventually, maybe I'll even return to the workforce.
But, there is no hurry. My husband tells me to take my time, oversee the household projects and just relax. He encourages me to take care of my own health (after a recent diagnosis of an autoimmune disease) and get my strength back. If I accomplish nothing on any given day, he doesn't care. I like that. I could get used to this lifestyle. In fact, I think I already am. That's the kind of change I can appreciate.
Getting back to September, however, there is something about the smell of the morning air that still reminds me of walking to school or the bus stop, in my new clothes, with a slight chill in the air. I wish I could enjoy a cup of morning coffee on my deck in the early September mornings to get that feeling again, however, this particular September, after a long hot season following a very mild winter, it seems to have upset the eco system in my yard just enough that the bugs are simply atrocious. If the mosquitoes, gnats, no seeums, and flies aren't enough to drive me crazy, the spiders are and they are everywhere. 
