#frickinglion mom tag

[imafrickinglion]

CW: Death, grief

Not a enough here to cut tag but seriously no matter how young you are (as long as you're not a minor), as hard as it is to think about, but especially as you get older, or start accruing property (car/house/etc)?

You need to do your friends, family, and other loved ones the biggest favor of their lives.

Make sure they know how to get into your phone. Your computer. Make sure you know what plans you wanted made. Get a will. Get documents. Get them officially drawn up and then for fuck's sake put them somewhere that makes sense.

A fire safe. A safety deposit box. A filing cabinet. A locked desk drawer (with the key on your key ring or somewhere else someone can find).

Please. No one should ever have to go through what me and my family are dealing with right now. Do not let your people go through what me and mine are going through right now.

#death tw #grief cw #frickinglion mom tag

[imafrickinglion]

idk this post is a rats nest

We close on my old house tomorrow. The one mom bought on husband 2, not even husband 3 (and current real legit father, thanks for adopting me bucko).

I wasn't so young that I've forgotten everywhere we lived before then. I can clearly remember the home on mechanic street where we lost husband 1. He stole our cat and our money jar, our fish tank, and oddly the door frame that we measured me against and penciled in the ages. I don't remember that dad a lot. He forced mom for visitation and he took me to this other house a couple of times that I have flashbacks about because good things didn't happen there. Eventually she sued him and I never had to go there again.

But there are good times in that old place. Painting my bedroom pink, various renters we had in the 3rd bedroom, parties, our first Atari, our first Hurricane. Pumpkin carving one year. The old washing machine with the squeezey thingie and washboard we used for a while.

After that we moved into a duplex in another city for a while. I have clear memories of good times there, too. We still helped people out in our church community by letting them live in our basement sometimes. I had a huge fish tank in my bedroom window and we had to use pastry rollers to get it into the bathroom to wash it. We had parties there, a tree house. One year a couple of kids sold us some of our favorite handmade Christmas ornaments on our back porch.

So it's not like this third house is the only family house we ever lived in. But it's the first house I lived in with my sisters. It's the house they mostly grew up in. It's the house we *all* grew into adulthood in. And it's a house that all three of us have moved back into here and there to take refuge from bad situations.

Seeing it so empty was difficult. But I could not take care of it. It was a broken down husk of a house by the time I got to it. A contracting situation never resolved. I spent from 2017 to 2023 freezing to death in my own kitchen and living room. We had no idea how *awful* the air was until we left it (lots of open walls, open ceilings, old house dust, construction dust, dirt that just magically came from nowhere and never cleaned).

I never could take care of the overgrown gardens, or trim the lilac bush my mother picked out and had specially planted, or take care of the red Japanese Maple she did the same with.

I'm sad, and I feel like I'm hitting the end of things I can focus on to distract myself from finally facing the truth of all this. It feels like standing on the edge of a cliff, with less and less things to stop you from falling.

But also I hope the investors make it beautiful again. I hope they clean it up and put new floors and open up the living space and make the bathroom shine again. I hope they put that gorgeous farm style kitchen in that'd make that small kitchen shine and that some small family or couple just starting out cook together in it and create great memories, like we did, baking pies and cooking for thanksgiving and new year's parties. I hope someone makes the gardens pretty again.

I hope whoever buys it takes such, such good care of it.

And that's kind of the best thing I can hope for. It makes it bittersweet. I couldn't take care of this family home but another small family might. I hope they do. I hope they fill that house with joy instead of misery and shame. I hope they build fires in the fireplace and snuggle up cozy in the winter. I hope they get a couple of pets, too. Maybe put in a new fence and get some dogs. We used to have this huge gorgeous black lab named Beauty, and when she had puppies, we also kept one named Ralph. We've had mice in that house, hamsters that escaped and got lost (but always found again). More than one or even three black cats.

I just... I hope the house gets loved again. I hope it gets used again. And that the next people can keep up with it and it never feels neglected again. Through mostly no fault of my mother or my own, it got neglected so much. You could feel it giving up, just like I did. I want the spirit of the house to be proud again.

So yeah, just... thoughts.

#grief cw #frickinglion mom tag

[imafrickinglion]

First birthday without my mom, those sharp bits just rolling back around to cut me

Most days I forget she's even gone

I'm okay, I just fucking miss her even when she's being the most annoying queen bitch of the universe. I'd rather she was here to annoy me

#frickinglion mom tag #grief cw

[imafrickinglion]

CW: Death, grief

My mom was living in the adjacent apartment space built over the garage of my sister's house. Back when this arrangement first started, it was so that my sister Amanda could keep an eye on her as she was always ill. Mom was helping out with the mortgage by picking up part of it with her 'rent', and she was supposed to sell her house.

She never did, which I guess I'm grateful for, since it's where I've been living since 2017. But of course it creates all kinds of issues. We've had to clean that apartment out far more quickly than any of us were prepared for. My sister can't cover that mortgage without a renter.

And she hoarded. She hoarded *so much stuff*. The more I look at her life from the other side of it the more I see the Neurodivergence. Pills that expired 5 or even 10 years ago hiding in the back of her closet. A broken exercise rubber band thingie, just hiding in a cedar hope chest. Old curtains from a kitchen she doesn't live in anymore. I cleaned that hope chest out tonight so we could move it to storage and found large pictures of me from nearly every photoshoot of me that our family had ever done. My youngest sister, too.

Cross stitch kits. Unopened. Pajamas that for some reason weren't stored in her pajama drawer. Broken electronics. A heating pad from the 70's, it doesn't even work.

She either never had the spoons to decide what to throw away, attached too much meaning to things to throw them away, or... some secret third thing. But I am so, so tired. My own Neuro spiciness is exhausted. Decisions, decisions, decisions, doom piles... nothing finally dealt with. Just more picking things up and moving them to somewhere else. I have no idea if it'll ever be over. And when it finally is... will all of this finally sink in?

#death tw #grief cw #grief blogging #frickinglion mom tag #hoarding issues #personal stuff

[imafrickinglion]

CW: Grief, Hoarding, Mental Health Issues

I made a special tag for those who need to tumblr savior it.

Today there were four of us at the meeting with the funeral director and none of us had any way to pay for this and that's how 3 against 1 votes ended up putting my mother's ashes in a fucking black, ordinary, temporary plastic box. And I get it, we're going to plant her anyway. But I wish we'd at least planted her in... Just something that wasn't a nondescript black plastic box.

I hate how undignified she went out and the fact that the emt didn't even think to put a sheet over her body to give her some dignity while a bunch of strangers and old friends (small town) tromped through her house.

We didn't get along well toward the end because she'd spent nearly 5 straight years completely unraveling and refusing any help or intervention. I missed her through those 5 years every day and I thought that made it easier but now I just miss her and I'm also angry about the lost time we could have had if she'd just let us help her. Especially me. I'm the daughter she made from scratch though I was no more loved than my sisters but damn it she used to at least listen to me.

I hate how expensive it is to die. I hate that she left no information anywhere for us and we had to resort to hail mary guessing pin numbers to get into her phone and computer and then everything was so password locked (and locked to her thumbprint) that I still have only scraps of clues about what was even going through her mind, or what help she might have left us to cover this.

I don't even know if this retirement paperwork is legitimate. My name on the retirement life insurance policy is in my *maiden* name. Our youngest sister is on there with her married name but it's spelled so incorrectly that it's going to be an issue. There was a will. It's not in her fire safe. It isn't anywhere. I don't even know where else to look.

Stacks and stacks and piles and piles of old mail, old receipts, old work files, my eighth grade report card, unsigned cards she bought and never gave anyone, gift cards she won at raffles and never used, *from years ago, like 2008*

And no Will. No guidance. Just... tons of shit she didn't want to deal with, so now it's left to us.

I'm angry and disappointed and frustrated and tired and I used to have this mom in around 2010 or so who I could have gone to for advice but she's fucking gone and she's *been* gone but DAMN, mom.

I know you thought you were gonna live forever and every time God came together you were just gonna fight him for another 10 years but maybe you could have prepared some backup just in case?

Mother please.

#mental illness tw #death tw #grief cw #frickinglion mom tag

[imafrickinglion]

The Southeastern Connecticut Relay for Life dedicated this year's Relay to my mom, who used to be the American Cancer Society's relay coordinator and personally ran this Relay and 1 other one for over a decade. She raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, and made personal friends with hundreds if not thousands of volunteers.

It's so nice to see so many people remembering her. The photos there include lots of me and my sisters, their children, and mom just being mom in her Relay pin hat (pictured on the table) and other gear.

The thing I notice the most when I look at these photos is how lit up she always was. Her smile could make you smile even if you were having the worst day of your life. I didn't... end up like that and I'm having to come to terms with a lot lately because I think I mistook her effervescence as her being overbearing, and too much, and too loud, and like she just... lived far far bigger than all of us. We used to complain about it, but we loved her for it, and I have spent 44 years trying to be less because of how scared I was that people would just complain about me too. And also maybe because living in the shadow of a woman like this wasn't at all easy.

But she's gone, her light has been put out, and I'm starting to feel like I don't want to be dim. I don't want to take up less space. I don't want to hide who I am because it's more convenient for everyone. I want to live every day like maybe tomorrow I won't be here and I'll have no regrets if that happens.

Lots to think about. We all miss you, anyway. Even if we're shaking our fists at you because you left us in such a mess. Even when I'm screaming at you at 3 in the morning because this is all too hard. I can't promise that I wouldn't still be like 'gosh she's so much and she takes up the whole room' if you were back. I like to think I've learned something from all this but maybe that's the lie you tell yourself so that you can make sense of something that is completely unable to be made sense of.

But maybe I wanna fill up a room. There were plenty of people who loved Mom for that. Maybe there's a middle ground. I'd like to find it.

#frickinglion mom tag #grief cw