Ten years ago today

Blogger’s note: I’ve struggled for weeks whether to post this, but in the end, I believe it’s the right thing to do – for closure, healing and maybe, to help others. This is our story, and it is copyrighted to this blogger, with the obvious exception of the excerpt from Oswald Chambers.

Ten years ago today, my life changed in a way that will continue to impact me for as long as I live.
About 16 months before, it changed in a profound matter too in that I met my future wife on the Internet. I moved to Pennsylvania and we pursued our courtship. In late 1997, I asked Amanda to marry me.

The bed

In the weeks leading up to the early part of September 1998, my mother got hold of an old cast iron bed and called us up one day and asked us what color we wanted it. We told her, and she commenced to transforming it into a deep, forest green. It became a wedding present to us. She even paid for a mattress to fit it.
I asked her how we were supposed to get it from Montgomery, Ala. to metro Harrisburg, Pa.
She told me we were coming to Montgomery to retrieve it.
So Amanda and I arranged for a four-day weekend over the Labor Day holiday to drive down to Alabama and retrieve the bed, then drive back with it in time to return to work on the following Tuesday. In exchange, we were going to leave some furniture with her to store.
On the Tuesday before, I’d talked to her and had a good conversation. I don’t recall today what we talked about, but it was without turmoil or discord, for which I remain grateful.
Beginning two days later, I started calling Mom to have one final review of things before we headed down the highway.
I left answering machine messages for her to call me on a number of occasions. The fact she hadn’t followed up immediately wasn’t unusual, so it didn’t bother me in the first few hours after having not reached her.
For the first time in several weeks, I got to take some time and do a devotional in the morning before we left on the trip. I use Oswald Chambers’ “My Utmost for His Highest” on a regular basis.
The day was Sept. 4, and though I was probably reading an older version, here is the link to Sept. 4’s entry in the modern adaptation of the devotional book:
http://www.rbc.org/devotionals/my-utmost-for-his-highest/09/04/devotion.aspx?year=2008
In hindsight not long after, I realized this key sentence was one of preparation for what we would discover: “Our Lord makes His disciple His very own possession, becoming responsible for him.” Though for periods of time, out of rebellion and anger, I have not lived as if this is true, I’m reminded as I write this that it is absolute truth.
Though my life is not I as I would like it to be – said the pot to the potter – the Lord has blessed us immeasurably. Sometimes, we’ve responded that it wasn’t enough. Lord, please forgive me for my ingratitude.
You have been responsible for us, though we haven’t always been responsible in kind.
Help us to change this. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

Departure

In the weeks leading up to our trip, we’d had some discussion back and forth with Mom about who should get wedding invitations and who should get announcements. Amanda decided the visit would be a good time to sort it out, so she took her wedding invitation database in a print-out so she and Mom could review it.

The keys

Not long before we walked out the door, I had a sense I would need the keys to the house. I was one of the few who had any.
I’m still trusting to this day it was the Lord.
So, I grabbed the chain which bore the keys to Mom’s house and we rolled down Interstate 81, still having hadn’t heard from her.
I carried my cell phone with me in hopes I could reach Mom from the road. We still hadn’t heard from her when we arrived at Amanda’s parents’ house in northeast Tennessee. They’d just moved there from Pennsylvania two weeks before.
So when we got to Amanda’s folks’ house, we called someone who was a family friend and who worked with Mom on a regular basis to see if he’d heard anything from her.
Nothing.
So our concern grew but we still didn’t have solid evidence anything was wrong.
Boy, it was nerve-racking.
We got up the next day and continued south on I-81. Over the course of our journey, we tried to call her again several times.
Still no response.
In about mid-afternoon, we reached one of the exits of Interstate 65 outside Clanton, Ala., about 45 minutes’ drive time north of Montgomery.
I went to a pay phone and tried home again.
This time, I sensed in my heart what we would find would not be good.
Keep in mind this would have been Amanda’s second time to see my Mom in person.

The house

It is no longer a secret, but for much of my life as a teenager, my mother required me to be selective about the friends I brought home and ask them not to tell about the condition of the house.
If there’s an actual name for what Mom did, I don’t know what it would be.
It wasn’t hoarding. It wasn’t out of greed. It wasn’t exactly the work of a Depression-era packrat. I still have no idea really why she did it.
But, beginning around 1978, she began to collect and stack newspapers and magazines around the house in piles. The piles grew over time and, one by one, rooms became useless because these stacks made them impassable and non-functional. These piles did not include household garbage, though she did hang on to canned or refrigerated foodstuffs for longer than necessary as well.
Sometimes, as an act of defiance, I would walk through portions of the house in a straight-forward fashion, instead of side-stepping so as to navigate the piles and or stacks of other things such as furniture.
However, this should not be my mother’s enduring legacy.
It should be the countless times she helped me out of a jam – with money, or a term paper, or math problems or … you almost name it and she was there to help.
The exception was … “Mom, how do you spell ________?”
The answer was often: “Look it up,” which I do almost on cue even today.
Mom’s willingness to help didn’t stop with me. I remember a time she helped out a friend of mine just because she wanted to and didn’t ask my friend for anything in return.
It must be pointed out that Mom had our bed ready and waiting on us.
She was robust, intelligent, funny, often witty, often undeterred, gutsy and just a great lady who also possessed a strong business sense.

Arrival

After getting into Montgomery, we made several stops to see if she might have been out and about doing some stuff. She wasn’t at any of those places.
With all possibilities on her location eliminated, we drove to the house.
I knew instantly something was wrong, because an orange recycling bag – left by city workers in exchange for a bag filled with recyclables – still hung from a tree branch.
It was Saturday.
We pulled up in front and exited the truck.
We dug my keys out of a bag.
We opened the mailbox and it was stuffed full.
Of course, I’d warned Amanda about what we would encounter when we entered the house.
No amount of preparation about the house would have given her needed insight for what she would soon face.
I opened the back door.
We entered.
Though I’d been in Pennsylvania for a year, I instinctively knew the paths I would follow to reach my mother’s bedroom.
I raced through the maze of stacks and stopped just inside the doorframe to her room.
I have no idea how long I looked at her – I’m sure it wasn’t more than 30 seconds.
But what I saw is still etched in my mind.
I did not see the often generous, active woman I described earlier.
She was gone.
What remained – at least what I saw – was a face containing a smattering of light and dark patches as it decayed.
What little I saw was enough. It still is.
We guess she’d been dead since sometime around Thursday.
This was Sept. 5, 1998, the official end of my mother’s life on Earth.
The death certificate says she died of an arteriosclerotic cardiovascular catastrophe, or a heart attack or stroke brought on by hardening of the arteries.
We found her 15 days shy of her 71st birthday.
Fortunately, word of the condition of the house didn’t become a news story, as others who lived in conditions outside the norm have. Fortunately, I am telling about this and not someone else.
I couldn’t remember the name of the funeral home where Mom made pre-arrangements, which, we found out later, she’d just paid off about six months earlier, but I did remember we would have to turn by the “black” cemetery, known at the time as such because of its condition and the race of its occupants.
Amanda grew up in an area where dead folks weren’t segregated and no such prefixes exist for places of burial.
This was Amanda’s first significant trip to the Deep South.
Welcome to Montgomery.
Our four-day weekend jaunt turned in to a week-long stay, which included funeral planning and preparation and a variety of interaction with friends and family.
Mom already had arranged for us to stay overnight at a bed and breakfast. We stayed there for the allotted time, then a friend’s house, then one more time at the B&B.
Instead of using it to clarify the wedding invitation list, the database print-out gave us the information needed to contact friends and relatives about Mom’s death.

Marrying and moving

Early on in that week, it was apparent we would need to move to Montgomery to deal with the aftermath of Mom’s death.
Our wedding was six weeks away.
We moved ahead with our already-arranged plans to marry and went on our honeymoon through Pennsylvania, upstate New York and Vermont.
We returned to what would have been the start of our new life together in Pennsylvania, only to pack up and haul our stuff to Alabama.
It took us about five and a half years to take care of a number of tasks associated with settling her affairs and going through her possessions.
We got to this end of it with the Lord’s help. Whether we’ve always acknowledged it or not, unfortunately, is a different story.
Our first year of marriage was quite the uphill climb – almost exclusively because of the challenge we had to tackle directly and with force.
Criminal activity compounded the situation beginning Christmas Eve 1998, when the first of seven break-ins took place at Mom’s house over the course of about two weeks.
Law enforcement officials got close to but never quite caught those responsible for unlawfully entering Mom’s house before we could (We’d made other living arrangements due the condition of the house.).

Ups and downs

There were some aspects of dealing with the house which were positive – mainly the response of some very kind and generous friends who volunteered their time, usually on weekends, to sort Mom’s belongings. A number of these people remain close friends.
Amanda’s parents also spent many days with us in the early going to help us get a grip on things.
We also struggled with infertility – a subject very few people are willing to broach because of its unsettling nature – while we were in Montgomery.
Eventually, we finished the tasks needed to move on with our lives and leave Montgomery.
We are certainly different people for having lived through those days in Montgomery. Whether we are better is up for the Lord to decide.
I look back, I see what’s missing is my Mom, who didn’t get to see her first grandchild come into the world, or send us articles on the best way to do this or that as a parent.
My Dad, who died of a heart attack nearly 15 years before Mom, isn’t here to offer some grain of wisdom or to hear me tell him how proud I am of him for his service as a soldier in the 84th Infantry Division during World War II.
He earned two Bronze Stars (They didn’t give them out for teaching classes back in his day.) in the months following D-Day and was wounded in action. He was also in the Army Specialized Training Program, which placed soldiers in colleges across the United States during WWII.
Dad was a bright, industrious man who held down a full-time job and maintained other business interests, including his role as the founding treasurer of a credit union. He expressed his concern for people in tangible ways, such as having refreshments ready at the end of the trail after a Boy Scouts’ hike.
He was a skilled woodworker and mechanic – he did much of the work on our vehicles.
When Mom died, so did my connection to Dad.
I wish they were both here.
But then we wouldn’t have gone through what we did, spent time with people we’d have never met or been given many other opportunities we’d have never had.
The Lord did his part. He’s been responsible in his care of us, having blessed us with a beautiful daughter, dashing our doubts about whether or not he actually listened or paid attention as we waited – sometimes impatiently – through our first painful bout with infertility.
We’re now learning to trust his hand in a new uncertainty as to whether we’ll have another child.
We have no idea what awaits us what the next 10 years, but I hope we will grow in our ability to listen to the Lord in new, finely-tuned ways.
I hope we’ll teach our child – or children – to do the same.
And, we still have the bed!