Grief Shopping for a House or How Not to Deal with Death

          On last week's episode we had learned that our heroine was awashed in grief. Rather than turning to the usual devices of grief control - drugs, alcohol, shaving her head, or binge watching Netflix - she decided to buy a new house. This was grief shopping to the extreme. Our heroine was obviously lost and a little crazy in the head, but she was being driven by her strong emotions and a narcissist real estate brother who was desperate for a sale. Would her childhood demons take her down the path of a bigger mortgage or would common sense prevail? Lets tune in.

       Our heroine is answering the phone...

        "Hello." 

        "Hi, my name is C. from the C.'s Team and I scheduled your photos for your house on Friday." 

        "What? That's not what real estate brother said. I can't be ready by Friday. My bathroom is torn apart to the sub flooring. The house is a mess. I have a trash pile out back."

         "Well, we want the house listed by such and such date, so it has to be this Friday."

        "Umm, I won't be ready." 

        "Then we can't list it by next week and we want to do that, so I have the photos scheduled." 

        "Wait, real estate brother said if I wasn't ready we could just take a photo of the outside."

        "We don't like to do that. We want all the photos when we list the house." 

        "That's not going to work. I need to talk to real estate brother."

        "I'm just trying to get your house listed by the date you wanted."

        "I understand that, but I won't be ready." 

         Quick goodbyes, and click, followed by frustrated screaming. Our heroine is clearly feeling her inability to have a confrontation, in the chest, in the gut. Calls real estate brother. Sets the time for a little bit later. 

         A week later and the house is clean. The bathroom isn't completely finished, but it will have to work. There is a huge garage pile in the back ready for a dump load- the old sink, the old toilet, and junk from the sub flooring. Surely, the photographer won't take a photo of the garage pile for the listing photos.

        He takes a photo of the garage pile. But it's a good looking photo on the official MLS listing site. 

        The listing goes live and suddenly there are a hundred million real estate agents wanting to see the house. Our heroine is overwhelmed as she repeatedly packs up kids and dog and escapes the house. One real estate agent doesn't realize that the door was locked and just thought it was stuck and proceeded to try to bust down her door. Luckily, the trim was easily repaired. 

       Another real estate agent starts complaining to her about the Team's lock box system. 

         Like she has any control over it. "Please, complain to me some more, I will change their whole system for you," she thought to herself as she said out loud, "They just put it on my house."  

        If she had any lingering thoughts of becoming a real estate agent, they were killed with every interaction she experienced with the real estate agents. Our heroine wasn't saying the reputation of real estate agents was earned, but they started to remind her of used car salesmen in better suits and expensive shoes. (No offense to used car salesmen.) 

        In twenty-four hours an offer comes through, it's only 3500 less than what they were asking and real estate brother says it's the best offer they are going to get, so they better take it. She was already not happy with the listing price and now she's supposed to take 3500 less in a market where houses in her neighborhood are going like hot cakes. Like cupcakes during the cupcake craze. Like donuts used to before cupcakes took over. Either way, she thinks they should wait for a slightly better offer. 

      But she's a people pleaser and so she says...yes. 

      Our heroine is slowly starting to realize she might be her own worse enemy. And the childhood poverty. But her lack of backbone is certainty dragging her down a path she feels unable to leave. 

     And the more she crunches she the numbers, the more she worries that although the mortgage lender says she can afford more house payment...her bank account is screaming at her with a different story.

    But does she listen to the bank account. No, she shuts him up and tells herself she's going ahead with the path, because to say something different might make her a failure. 

    Why couldn't our heroine just shave her head like normal people? 

     

         

Selling House- Buying House-Do not Attempt During Grief

         Before my mom died, we had been contemplating moving. Our neighborhood had been undergoing a transformation during the last ten years and it had made us question staying there. 

       When we had first arrived, it was composed of residents who were in their seventies and eighties. During the cool evening hours they would work in their yards; trimming perfectly shaped hedges and neatly trimmed edges along the sidewalks. Their houses were always freshly painted, and if their garages were opened, all the tools were lined up in perfect rows on peg boards. They always had a small amount of change for buying fundraiser items - candy bars from the orchestra kids, popcorn from the Boy Scouts, and Girl Scout cookies. Were they all friendly elderly people who ask about your day or greeted you during your walks - absolutely not. One older gentlemen had stopped caring about the state of his house many decades ago, and the latest addition of an old and greased stain recliner chair on the front porch was only the most recent eye sore of the street. Additionally, the children avoided his house for fundraisers because he often came to the door in various states of undress. Nothing exposed, but a lack of concern for his condition. 

      And then the older residents would move out. Some went to nursing homes or assisted living places. Other residents went to - well, I don't know the state of their eternal souls, so we can only wonder where they went. As they left, the houses, being part of a working class neighborhood, were bought by investors for rental properties. It didn't take very many years for the hedges to lose their sharp edges or for the yards to fall apart. The street started to have another beat, another rhythm to it. On weekends, you could listen to the neighbors two doors down yelling, shouting, and threatening each other. The more drink, the louder it was. And they weren't afraid to reprimand the neighbors either. Oh, and if your dog is barking louder than their fight, they're going to band together and start yelling at you. One time the neighbors above them couldn't keep their break up private and they were yelling in the street. They yelled at them to take it inside. 

      One time someone on the run had dumped a gun in one of the yards. My daughters woke from their sleep because the movement of flashlights in the backyard had awoken them. It was law enforcement trying to find the discarded weapon. Another night it was gunshots just a few doors down. The drug houses had started moving in. I'm sure our experiences were nothing like the inner city, but for our once quiet and family friendly neighbor, it was a troubling change. 

     Two weeks after my mom died, a house came up for sale across town, on the Westside. Ohh, a different zip code. The desired zip code of our town. Yes, our small town only had one desired zip code. The other zip code included the North side, the downtown, and our neighborhood. The post office had a separate zip code for the PO Boxes. If you lived in the annexed part of town that had bad water, roads that ended in weird dead ends, and where people could get a way with shooting off illegal fireworks, that was the last zip code. 

     We just had to put our house up for sale. It only needed a new bathroom, the sheetrock fixed in the basement, and a new roof. Suddenly, I put a frenzy of energy into preparing the house for our listing. I enlisted Hero Hottie into putting in a new vanity and floor into the bathroom. Enlisted? I think I was half crazed with something that had overtaken me. It wasn't grief -- it was the opposite of grief. It was avoidance. The more energy I shifted into preparing the house, the less I had to think about the state of my heart. You would expect that as I repaired, cleaned, and organized my house - the ever widening grief would diminish. 

     Hero Hottie liked the idea of moving Baby Blueberry into a different school district and so he poured his energy into the bathroom. Which as we pulled up the floor, we realized it needed a whole new sub flooring. He gritted his teeth and got to work.

     Grief blossomed and bloomed like the dandelions taking over my lawn. What was a house, a home, except something you escaped from when the pain was too much. My parents haven't given me an anchor of wood and shingles in my childhood. The only stable thing in my life had been my parents, especially my mom. 

     And she was gone. 

The Good Witch Lied, You Can't Just Click Your Heels and Go Home or Grief Covid Style

         By the time I had reached the age of eighteen, I had moved at least fifteen times. Take a moment to think about the implications of that statement. The math would suggest I moved an average once a year. If only that was the case, it would have been easier. But the funny thing about averages, is they don't mean much. Some years I moved two or three times. The longest length between moves was about four years. It was the most stability I had - those four years.
        A few years ago when I was writing for my local newspaper I would interview people working in the social work field. They all seemed to have big hearts and a desire to make peoples' lives better. They also all seem to have a lack of personal experience of what it means to live in less than middle class. But who attends college? The middle class. The upper class. Sometimes a person from the working class manages to bridge that gap. Or claw their way through the middle class language, vocabulary, and invisible barriers.
      In my town they would hold seminars for the working professionals in social work in which they would pretend to be poor. They would be given cards that would give them scenarios to work through. Examples included your car broke down and you can't make your doctor's appointment or the food pantry is half a mile pass the last bus stop, how do you pick up food?
       I was often asked when I conducted these interviews if I had a background in social work before journalism because I knew what they were talking about.
       No, I don't have a background in social work.
       I have a background in social class. In working class. In poverty.
      It wasn't until later when I grew up and started experiencing other social classes, (If you don't think American has a class system, then you're not working class. Consider yourself lucky and just make sure your town puts a bus stop out to the damn food pantry.) that I began to realize that moving fifteen times in a childhood wasn't normal. Moving half way through a school year wasn't ideal.
     Yes, I was always that kid. "Hello, class. This is so-so and she's new today. So everyone be nice to her." Do teachers realize how much a new kid loves to be told to stand up, have the entire class' attention on them and made to tell something interesting about themselves to the class? Yeah, I didn't think so, because if they realized how difficult it was to be the new kid, they might not make them the center of attention.
      I tell you these details about me, not because I ever thought they were relevant to my life today or because I seek some kind of sympathy, but because my mom suddenly passed away on March 30. And if that connection doesn't make sense to you, don't worry. I have found that in my grief, I struggle with putting all kinds of thoughts together. Some of them click as they should, and some don't. But neurons don't care when they are being destroyed by grief. So weird things happen in the brain.
    My Mom was only 59 years old and because of Covid, the hospital had strict restrictions about visitors. I wasn't even there to say goodbye or to be there for her. Hell, my dad wasn't even allowed to be with her. I was allowed to say goodbye through FaceTime, while she was sedated. But not completely, because her brow furrowed when I talked to her. When I said goodbye. And I couldn't make it better. I think the only thing she feared was dying without family by her side.
     Since that time I have struggled immensely. with grief. with a sense of failure for not being there. for failing to give her a house at the end. My Mom grew up in broken down trailers, and in tiny rooms of the back of bars, and in conditions that were not suitable for a child. If I don't know what the meaning of home means because I never stayed long enough to figure it out and I've been searching ever since,  than she wasn't even aware that she was looking for something.
    My parents moved seven more times after I turned into an adult. They might have stayed in the farmhouse, but 9/11 destroyed her business, and took nearly everything they owned after that. They house surfed after that, driven by storms they had no buffers against except for the weak ones two of their children managed to provide. Their third child, had to run to Texas to escape her poverty made demons, and I would tell her, if she was talking to me, that there is never enough distance in the entire world to run away from our own personal demons.
    My heart aches with the fact that my Mom died in a broken down trailer, with a leaky and moldy office room, windows that allowed the fierce Midwest winds in, and rats that crawled through her kitchen drawers. There were holes in the sub flooring which trips you on the way down the hallway, and the deck was falling apart. My brother had purchased them the trailer outright when they couldn't afford the rent on their last space. If he could have bought them something better, he would have.
    For years they had lived in my basement, before Baby Blueberry came along and we needed more room. I gave them shelter for the cost of running the Cove heaters because damn, those are expensive.
    I couldn't do more. I wanted to do more.
    I wanted to give her what she had spent her hard and difficult life seeking and I failed.
    But even had I provided a house for her. For my dad. Would they have finally found it? And what is it? I thought I knew. That's why I bought a house three days before I got married to Hero Hottie. And then my mom died and I find that I don't know what this idea of home means.
    I thought my lack of decorating was because I believed I wasn't artistic enough to decorate. I thought it was because the only thing I ever saw growing up, was that my parents would get permission from the landlord to paint the walls a light blue. In every single house. I thought my lack of style was because my mom used cheap, garage sale knick knocks and passed down doilies to decorate our spaces and I didn't like that style, so I didn't do anything.
    Then I had a realization as I spent hours thinking about my mom and my childhood, after she passed, I never took the time to decorate my houses, because even though Hero Hottie and I have been in our current house for over ten years, I expect to pack and move without a moment's notice. I'm always in waiting mode, ready to clear out. Ready to leave. Why decorate a space that you're going to leave? Heck, I have numerous dreams where I have to pack a bag and just leave. And in my dreams I'm always worried about taking the items that mean something to me.
    My mom has left me lost. As Baby Blueberry said, the first week of quarantine we did okay, the second week we started getting grumpy with each other, the third week Grandma died. And then counting the weeks stopped.
    Dorothy just clicked her heels and she found her way home. I lost the only stable point I ever had and I'm spinning like a tornado who might land in Oz or Kansas, or back in Oregon. And it doesn't matter, because no matter where I land, I've tried clicking my heels, and I still haven't found home.