Surreal

Author's Note: My mother passed away May 6, 2013. I wrote this, and its companion piece, "Bittersweet", in those first months after her death.

A few weeks ago, we reviewed the word "bittersweet". Today, we will discuss "surreal".

Spending weekends and after-work hours interviewing people to organize an estate sale of everything in your parents' home, and finding out that at least two-thirds of those people are untrustworthy, have no experience, or are involved in lawsuits, is not surreal. It's disappointing.

Finally taking the plunge and hiring someone, hoping against hope that you've made a good decision is stressful. But it's not surreal.

Helping that company go through all of the things your family had for fifty years, and trying to determine a price for them is bordering on surreal, but it's really just very, very sad.

And as I mentioned with the post for "bittersweet", finding things that you want, but can no longer keep due to space restrictions or their condition is equally depressing. But again, not really surreal.

Surreal, my dear readers, is approaching a home that was once your home where you and your whole family once lived, and seeing dozens of cars parked haphazardly on the property and spilling into the street, not because we were about to have another incredible party with a house full of Mom's homemade food, but because the day for a very different kind of feast had finally arrived. These guests, who in my head transformed into walking vultures, were there to pick the bones of my childhood.

Surreal is keeping my mouth shut while my dad's old pool cue (in its original case) is marked down to $12 for some guy who says he doesn't even play pool – and wondering why it upsets me when I don't play pool, either.

Surreal is grabbing that "one more thing" and secretly throwing it into the off-limits room so that the vultures can't get to it, even though I don't know where it could possibly go in my own house.

Surreal is helping an old lady see how to operate the medical bed my mother died in, and realizing I'm discussing it as matter-of-factly as the salesman who sold it to me for my mother only ten months earlier.

But mostly, friends, surreal is feeling (and maybe even hearing) something finally SNAP inside of you. You have detached, and in a split second there is only the gray relief of numbness. Emotion has gone.

But of course you know – you know damn well – that it'll be coming back for you.

Surreal.