“Closure” is an interesting term for an interesting concept in psychology, psychiatry, sociology and a whole lot of “soft ologies” that have been cooked up to explain or excuse a whole range of human damnfoolish behavior. There is an authentic fetish to “achieve closure” in such events as disasters – be they “natural” (i.e. a tornado or an earthquake) or “man-made” (a pseudonym for TERRORISM – witness our current Administration and its effort to “explain away” terrorist acts that don’t violate its mantras). We are supposed to seek “closure” for catastrophe, or to provide it out of whole cloth for the next-of-kin.
I’m certainly qualified as next-of-kin of my Dear Auntie – in addition to being her last “close relative,” and her attorney-in-fact, I’ll be her sole heir and executor when she finally has “Gone West.” But, this morning, I have brought about a “closure” to her former life, in the form of a real-estate “settlement” on her former home … and my boyhood home.
I’ve pondered this situation for some years, before the chain-of-circumstances that left her unable to fend for herself – and left me “choosing her nursing home,” a duty that should have fallen to her son, my cousin. Dear Auntie is not, by any means, my favorite person in the world; she’s the one who evicted me and my mother from the place where I grew up. I can excuse that, now, because I’ve done better than her in the long run … much better, in an awkward way, because there was nobody but me to take over when she came to the point that she was unable to take care of herself.
But, as her last living close relative after her son and her sister died, I’ve tried to do the best for her. I found a nice assisted-living facility, and got her a “studio apartment” (bed-sitter in Brit-speak) that has a big bay window (and a southern exposure for lots of reading light) at the sitting-room end and an “efficiency kitchen” with space for a microwave and a fridge for her ginger ale and ice-cream bars. They also have a nice dining room, and the meals they serve her are better than what I get for myself at home (way better than what she was cooking for herself).
Dear Auntie lived on her own for nearly 25 years, after her only son died. She had paid off the mortgage on her house, a house in a very-desirable “near suburb” of the one city that has always benefited most from the Federal Government … Washington, DC. It’s lost some of the inflated value it had in 2008, but I sold it for 25 times the price Dear Auntie paid for it in 1963.
I have spent the last six months clearing out “the old house” (as I call it, in her presence); finding and sequestering the valuables, taking away or throwing away or selling the stuff that couldn’t fit in her new home. I scraped the peeling paint off the walls, I tore out out the rotted paneling in the basement, and I paid to have the whole house painted and its original oak floors sanded and refinished. (They looked great, as the buyer’s realtor told me this morning.) I was able, finally, with the help of Dear Auntie’s former neighbor Elizabeth – a real-estate broker – to put it on the market a few weeks ago.
This morning, at 11:00 AM, we went to settlement. The buyer paid cash, which simplfies Dear Auntie’s situation (and mine) very wonderfully. He’s going to renovate the house and “flip” it, probably for some $100,000 more than the price-tag that Elizabeth and I were able to get from him. I’m not all that concerned; the purchase price will net Dear Auntie something like ten years’ lodging at “Shady Pines,” and I’d be surprised if she lasts another two years before she Goes West (God rest her soul). My concern is that she will be comfortable, and well cared-for, till her end – and that I will have my freedom.
My last visit to “the old house” – my boyhood home – was a couple of days ago. I hauled away the very last remnants of the things Dear Auntie had put away, stashed, and forgotten. Including my little-at-the-time cousin’s Fisher-Price “radio” music box, stashed in the most inadvertent place of all; something quaint and amusing that would have been thrown away in the renovation. Maybe I’ll give it to a “Kitsch Museum.”
Closure is a nice thing to have, BeijaFlor,
Somehow though I think it is something women require, more than men.
I think your first paragraph bears witness to this observation of mine 😉
What goes around comes around. Not only did your auntie lose her own children but in the end was forced to rely upon the one {you} who had every reason to despise her to take care of her at the end of her life
Dear Auntie is way less unfortunate than many oldsters, even if “the one who had every reason to despise her” is her last living close relative … and her guardian, her attorney-in-fact – and he only visits her twice a week, or so. Time washes many things clean, if you but let it do so – even spite can be worn away by its passage.
There is a system of religious philosophy – often labeled “gnosticism” – that sees us as immortal beings, splinters of the Godhead if you will, who live out our lives on Earth in order to experience life as a mortal being; to learn from its pains, its struggles, its inequity, and all its “wrongnesses,” up to and including death. Some versions of this belief system hold that we come straight into this life, all unwitting, from our previous death. Some hold that we spend most of our existence as spiritual beings in a spiritual plane of existence, parallel to Earth, and that we map out the lesson-plan of each Earthly life before we cross over from “the other side” and take up our new life. It’s a matter that is outside the realm of this physical universe, and so it’s impervious to scientific proof. But I find it comforting, and I have had experiences in this life that convince me to trust this belief.
If we look at Dear Auntie’s case – and mine – from that perspective, it appears obvious that both of us had lessons to learn from our situation. Seems to me that my big lesson was one in forgiveness and compassion … hers, poor dear, was to lose everyone and everything she held dear, finally to the level of losing her mind to senile dementia.
I could probably make a whole ‘nother post about this, maybe someday…
Spiritual beings having an earthly experience.
Ab – so – LUTE – ly.
I grew up with that belief-system. I went through a lot of “spiritual counseling” exercises (I’m being vague so as not to attribute them to any particular belief-system, or to appear to be boosting one) in which I reached back to my past lives to find the incident that started such things as psychosomatic illnesses and neurotic behavior.
(You, my readers all, are welcome to interpret my present behavior – especially the behavior that prompted that last paragraph – any way you want! And, by the way, I no longer subscribe unequivocally and blindly to that past system of beliefs. It’s been perverted very badly by its own founder, and (after his death) by its followers. I hope we learn about his own activities soon – he ought to be in his late twenties, by the standards described in his “Religious Technology.”)
Wow! I don’t think it’s accidental that YOU were the one to take care of her affairs in the end. God bless you BeijaFlor.
A long time since I wrote this article …
Dear Auntie “checked out” at the end of April 2017. She suffered dementia — fortunately, the “good-natured” version of dementia — her last few years; but it was a broken pelvis that made her limited life too painful to continue.
The night she died, I had a sudden, powerful recognition (or ‘revelation’) that she was in my life to help me learn forgiveness.
I think I learned the lesson.