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There is a house that resides in my memory. It’s
made up of rooms from the various houses of my past.
If I’m very still and silence the chatter
in my mind, I can hear the rough-and-tumble sounds
of a family growing up in that house of memories;
the clatter of pots and pans in the kitchen, where
my mother still cooks; my father whistling to the
marching-band music he loves as he walks through
the house, jarring me and my two brothers out of
a sound sleep in the morning. I can hear the squawk
of my mother’s parrot, Tony, who demanded
more attention from her than we ever did as infants;
my brothers arguing over something or other; the
sounds of our dogs barking.
I see the reflection of my teen-age self, as I
stand in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom,
trying on dresses, like personalities, and wondering
if I am attractive. There, in another bedroom, I
see a younger version of myself hunched over a desk,
doing my homework. I see my father sitting at the
massive Salvation Army desk in his office late at
night, paying the bills.
I see my parents dressed to the nines, my mother
in black lace and satin heels, trailing the sweet
scent of Arpege behind her, my father in a black
tux and cummerbund, smoking a cigar, showing off
for us before they leave for their annual New Year’s
Eve party. I see myself sitting at the top of the
stairs leading down into the Bavarian-style bar
that my mother created in the basement of every
house we ever lived in, where she and my father
would hold fabulous parties. I’m eavesdropping
on the chatter, the guests’ tongues loosened
by the perfect Manhattans my father mixed, and wondering
if I’ll ever comprehend the mysteries of sex
and money and adulthood.
I see the garden of this house, lovingly tended,
over the years, by my mother—her daffodils
and irises and peonies and gooseberry bushes thriving.
I see the little painted metal sign that my father
gave her, which she stuck in the ground under a
birdbath. Its message: “Old gardeners never
die. They just lose their bloomers.” My mother
lost her bloomers two years ago today.
As her eldest, I was the executor of my mother’s
estate and in charge of the sale of the house, which
was her major asset (my father had died eight years
earlier). My brothers and I finally sold this house,
which we grew up in and our mother died in, six
months ago. It took us a year and a half and cost
us thousands of dollars in expenses to maintain
during that time. My mistake was confusing that
aging house, with its creaking floors and faulty
plumbing, with the warm, safe, solid home of my
youth.
Even though the real estate agent—a friend
of my mother’s who had spent many evenings
enjoying my parents’ hospitality in the Bavarian
bar in the basement of that house—counseled
me to lower my price, I initially asked 40 thousand
dollars more than the price at which the house eventually
sold. In setting a value on the house, I was seeing
it through my mother’s eyes and the rose-tinted
glasses of my memories. (I think now that she would
have been smarter—more realistic—than
I.)
I’m not alone in making the mistake of letting
emotions distort the value of a family residence
when it is put on the market after a death in the
family. The other common mistake, which can work
against a quick sale, is the reluctance of family
members to deal with the disposal of the contents:
Who gets the silver, the furniture, the paintings,
the piano, and who will deal with the painful task
of emptying closets of clothes that still smell
faintly of the departed? Because the three of us
live in different states, it took us nearly a year
to empty my mother’s house. After we’d
all taken what we wanted, we hired a company to
bid on the remains and strip the house of everything
that was left. My mother’s cherished Rosenthal
now lives in my china cupboard; the gold-painted
cherub that she adored is perched atop the cupboard,
watching over me. And my mother’s Arpege,
which clung to the clothes in her closet, is a sense
memory that will haunt me forever.
Because of the money the delay cost us, I wish
now that I had been more objective in pricing the
house—I wish I had listened to the realtor’s
advice—and I write this hoping that others
will do as I say, not as I did. But I know that
for anyone facing this situation, the reluctance
to let go is a phase in the grieving process that
gives some comfort. What I’ve learned is that
selling the house—giving up the tangible evidence
of my parents’ lives—didn’t mean
that I was letting go of them. The memories (and
they aren’t all happy—whose are?) live
on, becoming richer and more complex as time passes.
After the house was emptied and priced nearer to
what the market would bear, the offers came. We
found that what the experts say is true: houses
do sell more quickly if they are fairly priced,
clean and empty, and prospective owners can imagine
making their own memories in the once-crowded spaces.
The other day, I asked my brother whether he’d
heard anything about how the family who bought our
mother’s house was doing. He still stays in
touch with friends from the old neighborhood, so
I knew chances were good he’d have heard something
about them. I wasn’t so much interested in
news of the new residents. I wanted to know how
the house was doing.
He told me he’d heard that the new owners
park their cars and a boat on my mother’s
once-manicured lawn. Perhaps I shouldn’t have
asked the question. It doesn’t really matter,
though, because the house of many rooms in my memory
is where my parents live now. The lawn is green,
the house has a new paint job, and, oh, the parties
they hold there!
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