A Hard Inheritance
Unpacking the baggage from my family home
“One day, all this will be yours.”
It was a promise my mother made years ago, wanting to assure me that I’d have some sort of inheritance. I scoffed. All I’d ever wanted was to escape my childhood home.
I also knew better. I knew how little they had saved. Whatever value resided in the walls of their century-old home was all they’d have in old age.
I’d inherit the obligation to clear out their decades’ of stashed garage sale goodies, the cobwebs, the memories.
Over a recent weekend, my husband and I wrapped what I hope will be the final stage in preparing a house I’ve always hated for sale. My parents have grown increasingly ill and weak over recent months and are now in a nursing facility near my home, all of us across the state from where I grew up, hours from that old house.
On prior trips, we salvaged the clothes and old family photos, not realizing even older photos — including one of my great-, great-grandfather from 1891 — were stored in boxes at the back of a closet. We’d been bleary-eyed, not believing that this stage had actually come. My forceful and at times terrifying father can now only creep a few feet across the room. His constant, anxious phone calls have become the background music of my life.
