A Matter of Perspective

Some day, many years from now, we may be able to laugh at all the problems we had during our move from Massachusetts to New York. I say some day, because we are still wading through phone, car, school, and employment issues. The issues we are now working on are far less stressful than the ones we were presented with immediately prior to our move.

To wit, at 4pm the day before we closed on our Massachusetts house, our lawyer from New York called and said that some paperwork or another hadn't gotten to her when the seller expected and that the seller had panicked, cancelled her movers and that now, instead of closing on Monday and moving in, we could not close until Wednesday. That's a nice call when the moving van is pulling away with all of your worldly goods destined to arrive in NY on Monday. To make things even better, our NY lawyer (whom I will never hire again), agreed with the seller. She'd been telling us and telling us that we weren't going to be able to get the mortgage and closing done in the time we had allowed and now, well, she was right. (That was very important to her.) Apparently our NY lawyer had annoyed our lender beyond all reasonable expectation so he was barely speaking to us and definitely not to her and it all became a case of a woman scorned (our lawyer) and looking for payback. Splendid. And on our dime too as all of our stuff had to be unloaded off one van, and moved to another at charges of $700+ dollars. And, as if all this wasn't enough, the moving company could not deliver our stuff until Friday, and then their truck broke down getting to our house, and broke down again on the way home. Would anyone believe that I had to haul the two movers back to Mass. in my car because I was going there anyway to pick up a son from a school trip? Yes, indeed, a wonderful time was had by all.

When the dust had settled and our stuff had arrived, and we finally got phone and internet service (two more extremely delayed operations) I jumped on to my email and it was all put into perspective. An email from a friend, sent a week before, told myself and others that her mother had died. And I felt terrible. It was all I could think about that weekend. For several reasons it bothered me. One, because I had spent so much time discussing the mother's illness with the friend and knew all the ups and downs and knew what a blow this was to the friend. Two, I was unable to get back for the services because I'd had no internet and had missed them entirely. Three, I was amazed at how much time I had lost from my life just wallowing through unnecessary and time-consuming moving problems. When I added everything up, I'd lost 2 weeks of outside communication with the world due to technical issues.

I can hear people thinking, "just go to the library and use their computers" which I couldn't do because I didn't have a library card and I couldn't get one without either a NY state driver's license or a utility bill. I know, I tried. But I digress.

Some humor here. While we ran into virtually every moving problem known to mankind, at least no one died. End of humor. I still keep thinking of my friend and her lost mother. From what I heard, they were close, perhaps the kind of close my mother was to her mother. When my grandmother was dying, I worried for my mother because she was so close to hers. I spoke to her one day about it, about how she would feel, what she might do, when her mother died and her reply was: "There are no happy endings."

She was right and it is all too true that there really aren't "happy endings" such as Hollywood likes to show. Things tend to me more ambiguous. There is a part of me that still thinks my long-dead grandmother might call and surprise me as she used to do occasionally. In my mind, she is still living in the small, sunny, apartment she occupied for many years. I don't think of her in the nursing home dying, I think of her, hose in hand, squirting the baby rabbits eating her petunias, of her enjoying a lobster on a trip to Maine, or driving around in her little orange AMC Hornet to see friends. In short, I don't remember the bad as much as I remember the good, the fun, the humorous, and the interesting. Keeping the good memories keeps her alive and well in my mind. I hope it is so for my friend.

The human mind is miraculously resilient but it still astonishes me that I expect to see my father-in-law (now gone almost 5 years) at the house every time I visit my mother-in-law. Why? I don't know except I suspect that the human mind loves patterns and it is hard to erase someone or something from the patterned fabric of life.

As long as you remember, you will never lose those you love.