Saying Goodbye

Selling real estate, even in the best of circumstances, is an emotional process. I’ve always had a deep respect for my clients who were letting go of a family home, but I never fully understood the complexities of the process until recently. 

When my 95-year-old father moved in four months ago, I gained not only a roommate, but also acquired a realtor’s prize possession, a listing. Upon his arrival, he announced that he wanted me to sell his house.  I knew it would be difficult to list my childhood home, but I put my realtor hat on and went to work sorting through 52 years of papers, pictures, mementos, and junk.

My parents were part of that illustrious generation that never gave anything away. If I hadn’t known better, walking into their house l would have thought I was in the middle of a frightening episode of “Hoarders.” Every receipt dating back to the early 1960’s had been stored in boxes, drawers, and containers. They kept decades worth of tax returns, Christmas wrap, and insurance statements. As I sorted our life into piles, there was no time for tears.

With three months of preparation, the property was finally ready in mid-September. After the first weekend on the market, we received multiple offers from multiple families. My dad couldn’t have been more pleased with the result.

When he asked to return so he could say good-bye, I wondered how much he’d be able to see with his eyes failing more and more each day, but we made the drive anyways.

“Do you like the furniture?” I asked of the newly staged décor.  

“I can’t see it, honey, but it looks great,” he responded.

As my father soaked in each room, I began to realize that what he was seeing was not what was present, but instead what was past. In his mind’s eye, there were the bedrooms where his children slept. In the living room, the couch was still perched in the sunlight so my mother could rest her tired body, and in the kitchen, the hub of our life, he could hear the nightly conversations, mixed with laughter, around the dinner meal.

As we strolled, no words were spoken. His crippled body was bent over in his wheelchair, but he quietly nodded as we passed through each room one more time. When we arrived back in the kitchen, he turned to me and said, “It’s time to go home.”

“Dad, this is your home.”

 “No, honey. It belongs to someone else now.”

We all know a house is just a building that protects a family from the elements and keeps them safe and dry. It’s the love that is created within those walls that makes it a home. Wheeling him to the car, I watched him collect his memories and carefully place them in a velvet lined box that he tucked away in his heart for safe keeping. A box he would revisit again and again.

I’ll miss that house. I’ll miss the massive oak trees I climbed as a child, the street where I learned to ride my bike, and my yellow and green bedroom where I wrote in my first journal. But on that precious day, my father taught me the freeing feeling of releasing a material possession into the welcoming arms of another for a new life to begin.

Memories are a treasured gift we never say good-bye too. The sandbox that I played in, the bathroom mirror I became a woman in, and the bedroom I dreamed my dreams are all in my mind to revisit – again and again.