Fire Update 48

Note: Subsequent posts will go back in time to the beginning of this saga.

This is the handiwork of a single squirrel and one electric wire.

The worst of the interior damage (top l-r: kitchen, upstairs bedroom, bathroom), and the current situation.

This morning, I woke out of a dream. I was in New York with my mother and someone she knew – maybe one of our distant cousins – sitting in a restaurant booth. The cousin asked which dead person I’d like to have join us, and what burst out of me was “My dad. That would be the Best Day Ever!” The conversation continued, and when she said something about going to a tarot funeral later that week, we were both so agog at the idea of a tarot funeral that Mom decided to extend her stay to attend it, and I was all “I wish I could, but I have to work.”

Now I am deeply curious about tarot funerals. Anyone who can enlighten me will have my full and complete attention. Also, in the dream, Dad was as dead as he’s been for most of my life. But Mom was as alive and as compos mentis as she was before the dementia came for her. It was a good dream, albeit the kind that won’t come true.

The kind of dream that *is* coming true, however, is our house. Oh. My. Goodness. Our house. I have gotten used to its various stages of disarray over the nearly two decades we’ve lived in it. When we moved in, I was working full time and going to graduate school. Which meant I never got to do the kind of unpacking and organizing I might have otherwise attempted. Then, while I was in graduate school and working full time, I helped Mom move from her condo in Cape Cod to her two-bedroom apartment in Milwaukee and then from the two-bedroom apartment into a single room in a memory care unit, where we spent the last four years of her life - her mostly and me a lot. Bottom line was that taking care of the house was pretty low on the priority list and when I finally had time to look around at it, things were pretty discouraging, on multiple levels.

Too much clutter on the “stuff” side and a small fortune’s worth of deferred maintenance on the structural side. We’d accumulated – and were in the process of paying off – too much credit card debt, and every time I’d bring up doing any home repairs, I’d be met with resistance because of the amount it would take.

So, I put my energy into writing a book. The confidence I gained from finishing it AND getting it published pushed me into declaring that 2025 was going to be the year I got back into the book I’d been working before writing the one that got finished – about the damage done by family secrets and the methodology – and mythodology – that goes into cleaning up the mess (eg: father’s suicide, mother’s denial, bewildered children who become stunted adults and figure out how to reparent themselves).

In tandem, my goal was to address the house. Decluttering to the point of having a peaceful living space so our adult children wouldn’t have to deal with it, and starting to address nearly 20 years of deferred maintenance. It was time to face the fact that if I wasn’t a hoarder, I was pretty close to the line, and Gene, my beloved, was closer yet.

Then, the AHA! moment – there was some relationship between Dad’s suicide and hoarding behavior. A book exploring that connection, while documenting the process of two near-retirement-age people attempting the process of pre-downsizing might make a pretty interesting read. I wanted to read it. Which meant I needed to write it. I wanted to know more about the psychology of hoarding, and I needed to figure out whether I was, in fact, a hoarder. Also, it had to be funny.

I started the research, keeping a dedicated journal, taking the occasional baseline photo, and observing mine & Gene’s reactions to our decluttering attempts.

Pretty soon, I had a title: “Excavation: A Lighthearted Tale of Suicide & Hoarding.” I didn’t have much else, but that felt like the right title, and I was writing it for an audience of one, so there was that.

Then came the arsonist squirrel, and suddenly my book had a new title: “Excavation: A Lighthearted Tale of Suicide, Hoarding, & Fire.” YAY!!! My very own “Eat, Pray, Love!”

We’re a little more than six months out from the fire, and it has been a real education on multiple levels. I’ll be looking back in future posts to how we arrived at the place where we are now. But suffice it to say that I went from living in a house I was trying to declutter to having to completely empty a house that needed to be prepped for repair. Decisions needed to be made. Money needed to be found. A trustworthy general contractor seemed too much to hope for, but we found that, too, releasing me from the potential nightmare of high-stakes on-the-job training.

I was at the house this past Thursday when a truck pulled up. Two skinny guys hauled in stacks of boards. In the kitchen, a support frame was holding up the weight-bearing wall while David, one of the carpenters, worked to slice off about a foot of it. By Friday, there was a header in place where a door frame had been, and there was a giant stack of birch in the parlor.

We’ve chosen paint colors, some already on the walls. In the past two weeks, I’ve picked out bathroom tile, counters for the kitchen & bathroom, and a kitchen backsplash. It feels abstract and dreamy, like a tarot funeral. With one major difference: At some point, I’m going to see it all in real time.