organize my Mom's stuff

Oct 21, 05 – One year anniversary of her death. Spent all day just sorting and organizing, and there is still so much to do…. but made some progress.

And I still haven’t had the “alone” time needed to perform the sad, solemn task of going through my Mom’s things, which are in plastic bins in my closet. The first few weeks after her death, my father had me do a frenzied “clearing out” of her clothing, and this really had a powerfully negative impact on me. I can’t get out of my mind how disrespectful it felt and how I had to make split second decisions to toss or keep. So I ended up getting everything provided to me in messy heaps in big garbage bags. In the first few weeks, I tried to tear through those as well, and ended up throwing out a ton of stuff I wish I had kept, such as toys that maybe Tyler would have liked. A few months later, one day when my son wasn’t around and I was working from home, I took a few minutes to look through a bag…and found some great treasures: an article about my mom and her band, an article with a picture of my mom helping patrons at her last job (at the library), sheet music for her big bass, and tons of old postcards that were her mother’s and grandmother’s. On October 21 of this year, the first anniversary of her death, I hope to be able to take a vacation day and go through some more, and finally start a nice scrapbook, so my son has something to remember his Grandma by, the Grandma he loved so much that he went into a quiet depression for days after she stopped coming over when he was just about 3 months old and she suddenly went into the hospital…