I think of it as the end of the story

All of our worldly possessions sit encased in a metal tomb known as Mini-U storage on Arrow Highway in La Verne.

Everything that means anything to us after losing our home is in that unit. Yesterday I went there specifically to retrieve my fire safe. When I moved the safe out of the way, there was this large, ripped and torn up stretchy GLAD bag that fell straight down onto my feet.

I took it as a sign. I took it as meaning that I was to take what was in the bag -paperwork from my house…scads and scads of paperwork marking the trail of time from the year 2000 until …yeah, until…  … take that bag and look through what was inside of it and decide what was important enough to keep and what was just more baggage for me.

Above the bag was an empty laundry basket. I put the bag into the basket and proceeded to make the short trek back to Pomona to dive into what was once everything to me. I realize now, after the past two days, that all we ever really “have” is someone else’s proof that we are in debt up to our eyeballs from our hunt for the American Dream. The proof is not the house, neither the vehicle, but the debt, the loss, the anguish that has turned into the dulling pain of what was once a dream that became a nightmare. It was never that we had our own house, but that we could say we did. Helendale became our home, the place where it seemed that we just fit in. All of our friends are there, but it is just too far away from everything we know. Though it was the place we adored, it was not to be. Hence, the reason that we are here.

Everything happens for a reason.  We lose what we lose because the time for those things and those people and those situations has come to an end, sometimes unexpectedly and abruptly.

There is some tiny bit of salvation in all the losses. Inside of the loss is the lesson gained.

For two days I dug through the messy and crumpled story of my life over the last eight years, from the triumphant first mortgage, to the tedium of applying for Public Assistance. Through it all I realized one thing about me – I must be made of steel alloy. I have to be. No one in her right mind could possibly have sat here digging through to shards of their life as they knew it, feeling like the loss was all part of a really horribly bad dream that just keeps going on and on and on.

The truth, though, is that I am glad that it happened this way. What I have gained from that loss alone can never be had again, can never be matched, could never have happened unless I did lose all of those things.

I spent eight months with my grandmother,  my Nana, and I was here with my kids. My kids were able to spend time with her, more time than I did when I was a kid at any of their ages. They learned to respect the very elderly, learned to accept that our lives will all come to an end one day, and that one day, like Nana and if it is the will of the Divine, we will look forward to leaving this life. Her last night in this life was spent with me holding her hand, telling her that she was very loved, that it was ok to go home, and that we would all see each other again one day.

No one can take that away from me, and when I think about what means more to me, hands down, it is that I got to trade my house for something far more precious than anything this world can serve up – time. We can all have a house back, and we can all make millions of dollars, and we can have new cars – our things, our money, our lives and livelihoods can be recreated.

We can never have people back once they are gone, and when I came to the realization that what I received versus what I lost, I realized that I was given a unique and Holy Gift, one which I will always hold within me.

I looked at the San Bernardino County Tax Assessor’s website. My good friend Kim told me that my house sold to someone, but it did not sell for more than what I had originally paid for it. It was the curiousity that was killing me, and in order to stop the gnawing at my brain, I looked. There it was, in black and white, and the reality that I was no longer the owner of that house on Strawberry Lane was real. It was real, finally, because someone else now lives in my former Camelot, my former castle, and it was real because there was a sell date, a new owner, and a tear running down my cheek. Yet it was not a tear of sadness, but rather, one of release. I could let go of the idea that the house would always belong to me, and in a way, it always will.

Seeing that information reminded me how I felt when I realized that my grandmother was gone from this life. Though both are physically gone from my life, I have my memories.  I have what means the most -history.

They are my memories. I own them.

MAPU