Divisions & Additions: Settling Mother's Estate

Family, 2003

Today was spent down in Buies Creek, my hometown in Harnett County. It's been almost exactly 18 months since my mother passed away, and her four children gathered in a metal storage building behind my brother's house to sort through her household items, furniture, housewares, and so on. Our heatwave of late meant that we toiled through this in 100-degree temps, and it was not easy.

The added wrinkle for us is that, after Mother's car wreck rendered her unable to care for herself, there was a drainage block in her air conditioning system in the attic in my childhood home; the leaking went undetected and led to a huge mold and mildew problem both upstairs and downstairs at her house. This calamity was not revealed to my sister Allison nor me until many months later, so I never saw the extent of the damage. I assumed that some possessions that would be dear to me had perished in all that or been destroyed when ServPro was brought in by the insurance company to do salvage and restoration.

But there was good news to be found amongst the collected boxed and bagged items: my childhood portrait was intact and in good shape, my high school and college and teaching posters and such were in good shape, and even my Legos from childhood were salvaged. Some clocks that I had purchased from my Mother over 10 years ago but not yet brought home with me were in good shape (it seems that only one of them was among the damaged items).

Still, it was an emotional and tough day. It did not take long following Mother's wreck for our family's fabric to fray, and there is little now to bind some of us together. The necessity of surviving this process in one piece mentally was a great incentive for minimizing disputes. I will say this, for any of you who are or who might be executors of an estate: it is a sad, sad day when things are orchestrated for a daughter-in-law to lay claim to items desired by the actual children of the deceased whose estate is being divided. It left me heartsick that my brother permitted that to happen.

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Mother loved my home and loved telling people about it. She was only here a couple of times, unfortunately; the auto accident that left her with brain damage occurred less than a year after I bought it. Still, for me there is an overwhelming joy in having now brought home and added to the Roediger House things that remind me of her or were so much a part of my growing up. (She was a fantastic mother. If there are things about me you like, or think are good, you can trace it back to how she raised me.)

It's going to take a while to unpack the several boxes that came home with me, and there will be more to bring back after tomorrow's second day of sorting and dividing.  I expect I'll be doing a few random blog entries over the coming days and weeks that highlight some of what she has passed on to me.