kazolar This is in the nature of a response to all the lovely people who replied to me: I live in NYC, I've no car; I was in my 60s back then; I had to take subways and buses to New Jersey where the huge  and once beautiful corner Tudor house was located, to fix the cracked sidewalk, take down a dead tree ($900), repair a house full of old clothes from the 1960s, plus newspapers, yellowed newspapers, my grandparents' furniture, broken toys from our childhood, etc., cobwebs (think Miss Havisham from Dickens' "Great Expectations") & pay to have someone clean up and take care of and then give away a filth-encrusted poodle, pay to have the house inspected and then read things like: "...evidence of rodent nesting in the oven" (which haunts me to this day; my sister said a big rat jumped out of the closet when she'd opened the door...). My mother was a sick woman and above all, in that fraught time, I was trying to keep my head above water while also doing the right thing as much as I could, as an executor... my original note was a response to the notes describing well-ordered actions of sifting through and separating out the possessions of loved ones who'd passed on; I was trying to say that in the best of all possible worlds those are admirable actions to take... but that this was not that world.Thank you again for all your thoughtful, supportive and lovely responses to my story, I was quite moved by reading them.

kazolar This is in the nature of a response to all the lovely people who replied to me: I live in NYC, I've no car; I was in my 60s back then; I had to take subways and buses to New Jersey where the huge  and once beautiful corner Tudor house was located, to fix the cracked sidewalk, take down a dead tree ($900), repair a house full of old clothes from the 1960s, plus newspapers, yellowed newspapers, my grandparents' furniture, broken toys from our childhood, etc., cobwebs (think Miss Havisham from Dickens' "Great Expectations") & pay to have someone clean up and take care of and then give away a filth-encrusted poodle, pay to have the house inspected and then read things like: "...evidence of rodent nesting in the oven" (which haunts me to this day; my sister said a big rat jumped out of the closet when she'd opened the door...). My mother was a sick woman and above all, in that fraught time, I was trying to keep my head above water while also doing the right thing as much as I could, as an executor... my original note was a response to the notes describing well-ordered actions of sifting through and separating out the possessions of loved ones who'd passed on; I was trying to say that in the best of all possible worlds those are admirable actions to take... but that this was not that world.Thank you again for all your thoughtful, supportive and lovely responses to my story, I was quite moved by reading them.

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