A Decade of Grief: My Journey of Healing and Self-Discovery Part VIII

“It’s just stuff.” “It’s just stuff.” “It’s just stuff.” This became my mantra days before Kathleen and her family were coming in to help go through mom’s things. Mom was a Disney collector. Her favorite movie was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, mostly because it came out the year she was born, 1937. She collected everything about it. I remember going shopping with her at Orland Mall. We went into the Disney Store. She saw HUGE stuffed dwarfs. She bought all seven of course. Thankfully, they kept the packages at the store for us to pick up on the way out, but even then we couldn’t stop laughing because not only were they incredibly bulky to carry, they barely fit in the car! I mean she collected everything!! And not just Snow White memorabilia. Anything Disney. She collected McDonald Happy Meal toys and had a cabinet stuffed with the toys and boxes. It also housed games, and hard to find Disney items. She collected  cereal boxes (we even found some boxes with cereal still in them), games, jewelry, ornaments, holiday decorations, dinnerware, kitchenware, lithographs, you name it, she probably had it. The sad part was, she wouldn’t open and enjoy these things. She hoarded them. We found so many duplicates. You wouldn’t know she was a hoarder by walking in her house. But to look in her closets, to see all these boxes stacked from floor to ceiling, in three bedrooms. She always felt they would be worth millions “mint in the box”, but the majority wasn’t. They were games that should have been played with. Dishes that we could have enjoyed dinner conversations over. 

She also collected antiques and books. She had an Indian pinball machine and a table pac-man machine (I took both of those). 

She was an artist and had many of her works hanging throughout the house. Pictured below are only two of her pieces. I have both of these. My sister took a few as well.

How were we not only going to divide this up, what were we going to do with what was left over? 

It was a very emotional week. By the end of the week, my sister had her van filled and had to also rent a U-Haul which my nephew drove back to Virginia. Mark and I also rented a U-Haul for not only the pinball and pac-man machine, but boxes of items I wanted. We also rented a large dumpster and had that filled to the top. That was a hard goodbye. Things my mother cherished, tossed like yesterday’s trash. It truly cut me to the core. But still, inside was furniture, clothes, and a beautiful dining room set that neither one of us had room for. We had Amves coming for the large items and Goodwill was taking the clothes and some small items. My sister was already headed home when they came. Once the house was empty and quiet I felt numb. I wanted to feel nothing. I didn’t want to feel the scream that was building up within me. Not only was mom gone, now, so were her things. I knew what was next, the house. I felt like mom was being erased from earth. I did not like this feeling at all. That night, I drank. I hadn’t had a drink in 20 years. But I drank. Jameson Whiskey. A fifth of it. I knew better. I knew I’d regret it. But at that time. I. Did. Not. Care. 

Next Week: Selling the house

Until next time…