The House Is Dying

As a child I barely remember my great grandmother, but I do remember how old she looked to me as a boy. With wrinkled skin, bruised arms and hands, thin white hair, she was confined to a wheelchair. That was my first time to be around a wheelchair, and I wanted to push “Grandma” around more than she wanted to be pushed around.

A flash of time and thousands of memories later, my mother looks like my memories of my great grandmother. Like Grandma, she is in her nineties—she will be 94 in two weeks. She is only able to sit up less than an hour per day. Her health has rapidly declined after several falls due to atrial fibrillation attacks six weeks ago. Before these attacks, she was mobile with a walker, but now she will never walk again. She is in a skilled nursing rehab unit at a nursing home, but in the last few days she has been unable to do rehab.

She loves the Lord and is prepared to meet Him in heaven. As I think about losing her from this earth, my mind and heart are full of memories. My mother’s house has been empty for two years. We all know that after a period of time when no one lives in a house, it starts to “die.”

The time has come to make dreaded decisions, and my two brothers and I just made a big one this week.

We will sell my mother’s house. We have agreed that we will not tell our mother what we are doing, and we will ask others who might talk with her not to mention the sale of the house. We are fearful that if she learns about the sale of the house that she will just give up—and that is not what we want.

This weekend the three brothers will meet at our parents’ old house to begin cleaning out. We will start with the most dreaded places to clean out—my dad’s shop and storage building. It is full of memories, but most of the things in there are of no value to anyone else, so we will be hauling much of the stuff to dumpsters.

It will be a sad time, but it will also be a good time for my brothers and me as we clean out so much of Pete’s “stuff” and tell Pete stories.

Of course, there will be a bunch of stuff that we cannot throw away, so we will probably be hauling home some items that our kids will ask: “Why did you bring these things home? Where are you going to put them?” Then, there will be a few things that Mimi and Pete’s grandchildren will lay claim to and might even argue about who is going to get this or that.

Even with beginning the cleanout in the shop and shed, my brothers are going to be fussing at me as I am a sentimentalist about old things—especially those that belonged to my parents or other family members. My dad prepared a handwritten list of things in their house and who he and my mom wanted to inherit those items. An old Singer sewing machine that belonged to my great aunt is one of the things that they wanted me to have. It has so much sentimental value, but what are we going to do with it? Our house is full of stuff already. And then there is the chifforobe that belonged to my grandmother. And the old clock that belonged to my granddad. Well, I love old clocks, so I can definitely make room for that one. I am hoping that some of our kids or my brothers’ kids are going to help us by taking some of the stuff.

As I think about the things that my parents are leaving behind, I am reminded of what I am going to leave behind. The financial resources, our house, our “things” and all that stuff is not what I am most interested in leaving to my children and grandchildren. Unfortunately, so many families fight battles over the valuables that a loved one leaves behind.

We put too much importance on the valuables that we will leave behind and less worth on the values that we will leave to our loved ones.

An inheritance is what you leave for someone. A legacy is what you leave in someone.