Feb. 24th, 2020 04:09 pm
Family ties
Overall, I'm very pleased with the work weekend in St Louis. We didn't completely organise the basement, but we made it possible for others to complete a lot of the work we did. At least you can finally access every corner of it. Technically this was true after my last visit but you had to squeeze past some unsteady piles. Now there are proper aisleways. We cleared a lot of space by tossing out old magazines and bottles and creating a large trash heap near the entrance for her workmen to remove.
Just as significantly, we went through all of Dad's papers and weeded them down to a single storage cube. It's painful discarding clippings and awards someone has lovingly preserved for more than fifty years but it's hard to see what purpose could possibly be served by keeping them around. I did save a few documents I thought might be helpful in revising/annotating his autobiography, but who knows if I'll ever get around to that.
Shortly after we arrived, my stepmom proposed scattering some of Dad's ashes onto the rain garden he constructed at the Ethical Society. I was a bit annoyed, because it looked to be a rather slapdash affair and led to me cancelling dinner with one of my favourite cousins, but I was willing to do whatever a fellow widow needed to help her grieve. It turned out fine; the niblings got into tossing the ashes in artful arcs or capturing the arcs on film and his wife said some very heartfelt words. In the absence of music,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bunj and I read out "The Dying Cowboy" from a paperback Dad had bookmarked. (The other bookmark was on "Goober Peas".)
The low point was the evening before, when after a long day of sorting, shifting, and discarding, our stepmom decided to vent to us about our mother. [Unknown site tag] got so annoyed he walked out and I wasn't able to fall asleep for a couple hours afterwards. But I suppose it was cathartic for her and it led the three of us siblings to renew our commitment to leaving our brother's legacy untouched until someone in the family can show a verified need for funds.
And the high point? I asked [Unknown site tag] on the flight back and he said, "Getting to spend so much time with you and Sis without a lot of other people around." I agreed. It's fun being at her house and seeing her husband and her children (not to mention our mother, who is often around) but there was something very special about swapping stories with the two of them and horsing around with some of the ridiculous things we found.
After this, looks like the next project will be our mother. One of the reasons she's been talking about money is that her finances are a mess and she's worried about living beyond her means. Of course, we can't determine that without knowing what he means actually are, which requires--among other things--going back to a financial advisor and trying to sort out how it's possible that her investments have been losing money. And that's going to mean more visits because, as we've learned, the only way to get Mom to do anything of this sort is to literally drag her.
Just as significantly, we went through all of Dad's papers and weeded them down to a single storage cube. It's painful discarding clippings and awards someone has lovingly preserved for more than fifty years but it's hard to see what purpose could possibly be served by keeping them around. I did save a few documents I thought might be helpful in revising/annotating his autobiography, but who knows if I'll ever get around to that.
Shortly after we arrived, my stepmom proposed scattering some of Dad's ashes onto the rain garden he constructed at the Ethical Society. I was a bit annoyed, because it looked to be a rather slapdash affair and led to me cancelling dinner with one of my favourite cousins, but I was willing to do whatever a fellow widow needed to help her grieve. It turned out fine; the niblings got into tossing the ashes in artful arcs or capturing the arcs on film and his wife said some very heartfelt words. In the absence of music,
bunj and I read out "The Dying Cowboy" from a paperback Dad had bookmarked. (The other bookmark was on "Goober Peas".)The low point was the evening before, when after a long day of sorting, shifting, and discarding, our stepmom decided to vent to us about our mother. [Unknown site tag] got so annoyed he walked out and I wasn't able to fall asleep for a couple hours afterwards. But I suppose it was cathartic for her and it led the three of us siblings to renew our commitment to leaving our brother's legacy untouched until someone in the family can show a verified need for funds.
And the high point? I asked [Unknown site tag] on the flight back and he said, "Getting to spend so much time with you and Sis without a lot of other people around." I agreed. It's fun being at her house and seeing her husband and her children (not to mention our mother, who is often around) but there was something very special about swapping stories with the two of them and horsing around with some of the ridiculous things we found.
After this, looks like the next project will be our mother. One of the reasons she's been talking about money is that her finances are a mess and she's worried about living beyond her means. Of course, we can't determine that without knowing what he means actually are, which requires--among other things--going back to a financial advisor and trying to sort out how it's possible that her investments have been losing money. And that's going to mean more visits because, as we've learned, the only way to get Mom to do anything of this sort is to literally drag her.