Digging In and Digging Out

OK - now that the in-laws have left, and I have a few more quiet moments, it's back to our regularly scheduled blog....

It was hard to know where to start as we cleaned out Mom's house. It was basically a question of, "reach out your hand, grab something, and decide whether to toss or keep." Some was obviously in the toss category - the old papers and magazines, food wrappers and miscellaneous post-it notes, unidentifiable ex-food of the I-don't-really-want-to-know-what-that-is variety. Others in the keep category - electronics, books, videos, keepsakes. But it was the in-between category that drove us nuts. Books which were slightly torn or dampened, miscellaneous papers which might be needed for the upcoming legal issues, random notes my Mom left on every scrap of paper (a variety of unidentified numbers & names, none connected, but any one possibly important) - all these were items which needed to be considered.

My SIL decided to dig her way to the kitchen. On her way she discovered lots of empty alcohol bottles (we hadn't know my mom was an alcoholic - that was a new fun fact we discovered in this process), a variety of books, and in the entrance to the kitchen, several bags with milk jugs and eggs which had never made it to the refrigerator (because Mom couldn't reach it). Some of the milk had actually solidified.

My brother was in charge of electronics, so he sat in Mom's chair and sorted through various things we brought him. Later, he helped DH start down the hallway to see what the back rooms held. Unfortunately, the kitties had used this as their secondary (tertiary? tetratiary? pentatiary?) litterbox, and it was disgusting. They had to shovel up the carpet in the hallway, wearing gloves, it was so bad. If I hadn't know it before, I knew then that I had married the right man. No other guy I had dated in my past would have loved me enough to shovel cat poop out of my mother's house. Nobody!

I worked my way toward the fireplace, then decided to see what wonders the deck held. You see, we had noticed that the deck was full of packages, boxes, and horse tack. I had realized that some of the boxes appeared unopened, and I wanted to know what was in there. Not to mention saving them from the predicted rainstorm.

Most of the boxes were Mom's e-bay purchases. She had bought so many things on e-bay that she couldn't fit them inside the house. She also had several of those Property of the US Post Office white plastic bins full of unopened mail - all of which needed to be sorted piece by piece, looking for important tax and other legal information. Underneath those were several boxes containing books and videos. Of course, this is California. In January. When it rains. And is cold (relatively). So there I am, standing in the rain and the dark, sorting through a year's worth of e-bay packages, mail, horse tack, books and miscellaneous other items.

That's where we made some of the most interesting discoveries. First, I found the Uzbekistan pants. What, you ask, are the Uzbekistan pants? Well, one of the first packages I opened was small - about the size of a Kleenex box -and soft sided. I could tell it had been outside in the rain for a while, as the brown wrapping paper was soaked through and faded. The only thing still legible on the outside was the country of origin - Uzbekistan. Inside, however, the sender had had the foresight to double wrap the item in a plastic bag, so although the outer wrap was disintegrating, the item was intact. I pulled out the most unbelievable pair of pants you have ever seen. Now, my mom was a large woman - 6+ ft. tall, and extremely... um... "full-figured" Picture the largest pair of pants you have seen, only make them royal purple. And velvet. And embroidered. With gold trim on the cuffs. Oh, and add some jingly things. I can't even begin to find the right words. I promise, before the week is out, I will post a picture of the pants. I have kept them, as my own personal memento of one of the most unusual items we found. I think I want to frame them (but DH won't let me).

The other interesting item did not generate nearly so much laughter. In one of the crates of mail, we found the foreclosure notices for the house. Up to that point, all LL could tell us was that something was going on with the house, but he didn't know the details. This letter gave us the amount due, and the deadline for sale of the house. We found this letter around the 6th of January. The sheriff's sale was scheduled for the 16th. Eventually, we located a dozen notices, dating back several months, informing her of the foreclosure. She hadn't opened a single one. And she'd never told her husband.

The crates were full of junk mail, but they were also packed with bill after bill, late notice after late notice, collection letter after collection letter. Rather than deal with these problems, Mom had simply not brought them into the house. Out of sight, out of mind, right? This way she also could avoid telling her husband (LL) about what was going on, since he never went outside (health issues - I'll get into that later). In a way, I can understand - it made me depressed reading these over and over, and it wasn't even my problem. How much more depressing was it for her, as she watched everything spiral out of control, and felt powerless to stop it? I spent hours sorting through all this paperwork, and would end each evening panicking, depressed, worrying that I, too, had forgotten to pay my bills, sucked into the vortex of her devastating situation.

Within a couple of days, I was able to contact the mortgage lender on the forms. It wasn't a large bank, it was an individual investor. He had no business giving Mom a loan with her credit history, but he had to have known she would default, and that he would then get the house, which per the market in that area should have been worth 800K to 1M (pre-real-estate bust). But at least working with a private individual, we had a chance to negotiate. He gave us a 2 week extension so we could work out what we were going to do, where we stood financially (broke), and just have a breather to think.

And so began my fun as the executrix of the estate(s). LL was still suicidal, but he promised to stick around long enough to sign whatever papers were needed to give me power of attorney and make me executrix (I love that word... maybe because it sounds so much like "dominatrix". Hate the job (which I've done 4 times now), but love the word!) I contacted our lawyer out there to draw up legal documents, found a notary and had LL sign them (and no, we couldn't purposefully delay just to keep him from suiciding - he nixed that right away). I worked with the mortgage lender to find out what would be needed to pull the property out of foreclosure. I sorted through boxes and boxes and boxes of paperwork, searching for title information (to houses, the 4 cars in the driveway, the two horse trailers, anything!), tax information, horse information, debt information, and anything which might possibly come back to bite us. We found house paperwork hidden in the lining of the back of Mom's chair. We found titles to cars stuck inside old books and stacks of paper. Most of the bills were unopened (and wet... fun!). We never did figure out the horses.

At least, when you're spending hours and hours with family, stuck inside and doing nothing but sorting things (a half-brained activity at best), interesting things can happen....