Family ties

Family matters have been pressing this past week, the reason I haven't posted anything. Two of my brothers came down and we/they cleaned out my mother's house to start getting it ready for sale.

It's been a difficult experience. For one thing, it's sad seeing my mother's life here just disposed of. All the things she accumulated over the years with my father and all the junk she pack-ratted away the last few years. And these situations tend to not bring out the best in families. This didn't bring out the best in mine.

There wasn't much I really cared to have out of my mother's house. The only thing I really desired was a desk one of my brothers also wanted. I ended up with it, and one set of a couple of sets of china, and a dining room table neither of them wanted but I could use. They hauled some other stuff to my house that they didn't want and I didn't either and simply loaded other things on their trucks without any discussion.

They had preferred I take care of all the house-clearing and junk tossing, then put the furniture and good things in storage for them to get at their leisure, but I didn't.

I've been trying not to be resentful. I've needed the help of the Holy Spirit to get through this. It's been the same pattern through the past few years. I've been here dealing with it all -- my mother's deterioration, the difficulty in dealing with her, dealing without any backup from anyone when I tried to get her out of the house before she got so bad (and this is a shame, because she would be in so much better shape now if she had been in assisted living that last year or so).

Then I dealt with the hospitalization and getting her into assisted living at a good place, dealt everything alone -- neither of them even came down until she had been at assisted living for a while -- but they always want to be in charge. They would have let her go back home alone for a few months until they found some time to come down and make the decisions.

So I let them do all the heavy work on this -- getting the furniture and piles of junk out of the house. There are still things to do, such as clean out some closets and books and miscellaneous things that won't involve heavy lifting. I'm going to have a cleaning service come in and clean afterward. The house is very dirty because my mother wasn't cleaning and taking care of things much the last couple of years and didn't want anyone coming in to her house to do anything. She would get offended even if family tried to do things.

It's sad.