Another Home

To come back to my mother’s house, our house of so many years and this time close it down for the last time, was emotionally trying.  Can I compare such an event to moving her into assisted living? Probably not.  Both were incredibly trying in their own way.

Moving mom into assisted living was the right thing to do.  She was languishing in her home, and since she was no longer able to drive, found herself stuck there without human contact.  In fact, besides phone calls, she was without a great deal of human contact and resigned her interactions to that she had with the t.v. or the many phones calls from Peter and to a lesser degree me.

I asked a question on FB and it basically went, “Do these things find me or do I find them?”  I asked this for I kept coming upon important or interesting family photos, letters and documents that had a great deal of meaning in as far as my life is concerned.  My last four days at 25 Brownleigh found me spending up to 10 hours a day sorting, reading, and organizing.  It began to have an unsettling feeling on my brain.  I wondered how much I had become me on my own, and how much I was part of this genetic plan that was more clearly delineated as I read more-and-more of these historical Margolis documents.

I think over these days, I have learned just how much my mother and father loved one another.  I don’t believe I ever realized just how significant and wonderful their love for one another was.   Reading a good deal of what appeared to be their daily correspondence, which kept up for several years during the 40’s (!), I found that they had so many dreams and hopes for the future, yet also a deep and emotional desire for the present.   This is important to recognize as we sometimes put too much of our energies into the future when in fact our focus is better served in the here and now.  Seize the day and certainly seize the moment(s). 

I was saddened though not very surprised, that after all these years we are still unable to get along with our brother Steve.  I read so many letters that he wrote, or that I wrote, or those by my father lamenting one bad choice after another that he made.  We spent so much of our time and energy trying to figure out a way to keep him from destroying our family and even now so much effort has to be put into this endeavor.  I would like to chalk all of this up to merely a difference of opinion, but it is a difference of lifestyle, respect and approach to living.  I am again forced to realize that one chooses their roads and that bad luck, if there be such a thing, is transient and though unexplainable things do happen and sadden us greatly, there appears to this 54+++ year old that a great deal of choice in which we firmly have hold of the rudder, exists.

So this is the end of a long journey.  I leave my childhood house for the last time and now sitting here in the airport in New Jersey, recognize that nothing stays the same nor can it be expected to.  I wish my mother some great years at Chatfield and hope that she makes many friends and has numerous good times with all of us.  I hope that she in fact learns to love her life there and that everything will turn out nice for all of our families.