My kid sister suspects the estate sale coordinator she hired has walked off with some of my mother's more valuable pieces before this weekend's sale. Well, what does she expect me to do about it? He wasn't my choice,* I've never met him, and that house was so full of stuff, I have no idea what was there and what wasn't. Oh yeah, and I don't care. This was never going to be a massive money maker for us anyway. I thought it would be neat if we could have simply said, "Get all the stuff out and give us $500." But this is the path we're on.Then there's my bitch of an older sister. Remember, she is not involved in this -- not in terms of money, except for $1,000, nor in terms of time. Yet she seems to think I'm willfully mismanaging everything and has relayed to me, through my kid sister, that she insists on "real receipts, not post-it notes" for everything. Oh, PUH-LEEZ! There is no fortune. At the end of the day, we'll probably just break even. She's just trying to insert herself into the process and give herself the illusion of control. I'm reimbursing her for her princely sum of $1,000 today, out of my own pocket, hoping to stave off any battles going forward. But it's hard to know how to pacify a crazy person.
I had a dream the other night that my mother came back from the dead, for just a few hours. I had so many questions for her -- not about the afterlife, but about our relationship and what she thought of the service we had for her. Then, even in my dream, I toyed with asking her to sign a check so we could get the money out of her checking account. In the dream scenario I stopped myself because I didn't want to waste our short time together on money. But that's how much I hate this process! It's even permeating my dreams.
Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
*She could have hired the woman my oldest friend used to empty her house prior to moving cross country. I would have preferred that woman because we know what her services are and had a credible reference. But my sister didn't like her and thought she wasn't worth the extra expense. I let my sister make the choice and here we are.