Weekday Worn

The tone of this blog might change somewhat with this post. I was trying to keep the jet-setting, culturally (in)competent posts separate from the radical shift that took place in my family’s life recently, but it occurs to me that this event has been as much a part of my life, and the struggles I try to work through via the thoughtful individuals who peruse these pages occasionally, as was last summer in Egypt was, or the electrical fire that decommissioned the co-op in 2005.

Dad died November 1. He had been sick for nearly two years. “Sick” being a cruelly incomprehensive word to replace the more cumbersome but accurate label of “diagnosed with fourth-stage non-small-cell and therefore terminal lung cancer.” I moved into my childhood home, my family’s home, to help him and my siblings through the weirdest months of our lives. And in turn, I was helped by them through the perverse experience of taking on the role of a caregiver with a person who had changed my diapers some 25 years earlier, funded my college education, yet could still scowl at my boyfriends.

He knew that by giving power of attorney and the role of estate executor to his 26-year old daughter, he was burdening me with one of the most difficult tasks I would ever perform. He knew I would be called upon to negotiate money matters with my younger siblings, navigate the fluid and not always altruistic interventions of relatives, and would necessitate riding the rapids of this country’s legal maze and housing market.

Thus, while attending graduate school full-time (though not necessarily attentively) and maintaining a part-time internship (poorly), I’ve been doing just that. I’ve met with the family attorney dozens of times, observed powerful splits between distant family members on matters of money, accepted the double standard of an allowance-giver being an allowance-receiver, exercised patience in discontinuing dozens of his affiliations (you name it: newspaper subscription, telephone provider, garbage pickup, acupuncture, health insurance, internet connection and the like), and oh lord, don’t even get me started on the housing market. Don’t even get me started.

Weekends have taken on entirely new significance. No longer are they solely a respite from classes and employment obligations. (With a non-profit internship, they were NEVER a respite from employment obligations.) Now, they are a respite from responsibility. Banks won’t close my father’s accounts on weekends. The garbage pickup service won’t take my calls. I don’t receive past-due bills or ghost bank statements in the mail. The family attorney has taken his kids to their lake house.

On the weekends, I don’t have to call dozens of strangers in every armpit of the country and explain to them – to multiple departments within the bank/phone company/post office/insurance denier – that their client, my father, passed away five months ago, and as his Executor (Executrix, if you want to get linguistic), I am calling for the cessation of whatever the hell service it is. Again and again I tell the story during the weekdays, in between classes and bus trips to work and moving into a new apartment and maintaining social ties. Weekends during this ravagingly beautiful Minnesota spring don’t tantalize me with the opportunity to exercise outdoors, complete long-forgotten art projects, or catch up on a tsunami of school work. My phone stops ringing. I stop dialing. My cat starts purring. And finally, finally, I sleep.