## 260113: Exodus

On my way to the lawyer's office I allocated plenty of time to get down there,
in case of traffic etc, and on arriving in the Venice area realized that I
still had plenty of time before our appointment.  I decided to bop into town
briefly to see the condition of the Venice Theatre, which had basically gotten
destroyed in Hurricane Ian three years before.  I was here for Ian, and it was
quite the experience, that I described in an older diary section.  The "fly
house", which is the space above the stage where setpieces and backdrops and
lighting pipes can be raised into via an array of cables, got all its exterior
walls ripped off, letting the storm's rain dump into the building and ruin
everything underneath.  It took the theatre's community 3+ years to finally
raise enough money to start rebuilding it, and Ron DeSanctimonious had been
no help by pulling money *away* from the arts in the meantime.  But they're
rebuilding it now, higher and stronger than the last instance.

2022 just after Ian	2026: finally rebuilding

This time, I pulled into a parking lot behind the building and the ongoing
project filled the phone's camera field, so the 2026 picture is from a very
different viewpoint than atop the nearby drawbridge where I snagged the 2022
one.  As I was eyeballing the work, someone popped out the back door with a
paint-splattered apron on, and I engaged her attention.  She was a set painter,
and a lot of their volunteer crew were already back at work anticipating the
venue getting back on its feet and running shows.  She gave me more detail on
what had transpired in the last 3 years.  If I lived down here, I'd definitely
be volunteering my time and skills for their organization.

After the lawyer visit, it was time to head back "home" and continue the slog
of sorting house contents and getting things ready to go out in the trash or
home with me, and figuring out how get the rest of the large furniture out
of there.  Tidewell didn't actually want the tall bookshelves, it turned out,
so after the neighbor-level offers and local donations phases, it was now down
to engaging whatevr "Mr. Junk" whole-house emptying outfit I could find.

I scheduled one on a recommendation from the retirement facility, and while it would cost a bit for that final step I just went with it. I tried to set things up to make their job easier, by moving things like the beds out near the front door where it all would eventually exit the place. One odd piece was the large sheet of stiff 5/8" plywood Mom had between her box-spring and the mattress, presumably to make the bed stiffer, but I managed to pawn that off to the campus Maintenance people to use for whatever they wanted rather than just have it thrown away.

Meanwhile, the pile of things I intended to take back to Boston was growing, and I had to keep critically eyeballing the volume I would have to stuff into the car. The crates I was filling were already *very* densely packed and quite heavy, but that was intentional. And I was already thinking about how all these objects would Tetris together in the available rear space. The rest, at the right edge of the shot, was piling up the recycle and trash I'd need to put out for collection.

One task that really killed me was having to take apart several *thick*
notebooks that Mom kept containing her own notes and data-collection efforts.
There was no way I could construcively use or even archive these at home,
so part of the effort was to disassemble them, compact the contents for
disposal, and bind all the enclosing notebook containment into one compact
trash item.  Howwver, I did take some example pictures of how these notes
and archives were constructed before destroying them, so I could then show
just how *internally* organized Mom had been when deep-diving into study of
any particular topic.  I worked some of these into a "details" page for her
memorial website, just to illustrate more about how her mind worked as she
went through these different keen-interest phases.

Then I posted a pointer to this in various interest-group forums, in
particular the "Ravelry" fiber-arts site, and one of the Tarot discussion
groups.  Here's how I presented it, which also represented quite a bit of
retrospective thinking on my part:

     I've put together a quick study of how Barbara organized some of her
     internal knowledge and notes, viewable here.  She was meticulous in
     both material for external publishing and in her own notes and
     references, to a degree that I never even understood until I started
     digging into some of this stuff.

     Truly an amazing lady who used her time on this earth more wisely
     than many of us could ever hope to, as y'all have said in numerous
     ways.  This very morning I finished emptying her house and packing my
     car with the stuff I would take back home and keep, and it was *very*
     surreal walking around the completely empty house that had been my
     "home" over eight years' worth of holiday seasons.  In another day or
     two I'll be on the road northward, starting a phase of my life that
     will no longer include her stalwart presence, in person or over the
     phone or email.  After a week-plus of being in heads-down "work
     mode", this is a serious moment of reflection on how I may not have
     fully appreciated who and what she really was over the years.

Not to mention which of those work-ethic virtues she tried to impart to me
while I was growing up.  In most aspects she succeeded, but not necessarily
in all.  Everybody's got their little faults...

But back to the real and present world.

After I had badgered them about three separate times, Tracfone *finally*
shipped a replacement phone for Mom's one that had gone completely dead.
I had sent it back over a month ago, and they were just sitting on the whole
request not actually generating a warehouse order.  Finally a new phone showed
up on the doorstep, so I spent half a day on the usual task of ripping down
its Android to the very basics and disabling whatever junk services I could.
But this was no longer for Mom's benefit to make a smartphone as "dumb" as
possible, it was just to bring it to my own acceptable level of minimalism
and basically have a phone just be a phone.  I'd been through this a few times
now, and had plenty of notes on what pieces of Android were just fluff or
privacy-invading and weren't needed.  So now this would just be a spare number
I'd continue to have available, and on a different carrier than my regular
phone.  Tracfone is still one of the cheapest cellular plans you can get --
baseline $100 a year to keep a given number, and fairly generous minutes
and data for a low-usage customer like Mom would be.

I contacted one of the financials that we had never gotten around to making
me a full co-trustee on, which was arguably dumb as doing that had already
made various transition processes far easier at the others.  I sent some
documents to a magic email address at their facilities to try and get the
process started, but online access had already been locked out and we
concluded that the whole thing could simply wait until I got back home and
I'd essentially start from ground zero with recent statements and a death
certificate and do everything on paper with "medallion" signature guarantees.
This one is a kind of old-skool institution that still does a lot of stuff
on paper anyways, so that's fine, no hurry.

A broader problem with the financials was that some of them had declared
dividend distributions on Dec 31, which would technically be "estate income"
and thus subject to filing a 1041 estate tax return for.  Argh.  I was hoping
to avoid that in general, but the next best thing would be to bail all of
those relationships out of the "trust" setup and into personal accounts and
hopefully before any further distributions happened in 2026.  I'm wondering
if I can handle that myself, as I do all my own taxes in MA including having
to deal with state income tax and fund assets with *portional* percentages
of income based on my own state and thus exempt from taxation, yadda yadda.
Even though I have my Dad's estate return from 2017 as a model, I'm probably
still going to have to find a "tax guy" to confirm what I need to do here.
This really brings home the inevitability of "death and taxes" -- it's all
interrelated in this fucked-up greed-fueled society we live in, where mere
mortals can essentially no longer do their own taxes due to the relative
impossibility of actually understanding how it works and the multiple feet
of bookshelf holding the overly complex IRS tax code behind it.  Me, I do it
all out longhand on paper first and then hit up the tax-prep website and make
sure that the number they come up with matches the one I came up with, and
then once things resolve correctly, file the return through their e-file process.

Later, my new-found "adventure friend" from the campus surfaced, after being
heads-down in various organizational projects of her own, and we agreed
to take a break from all this worry and go take another beach walk.  We headed
out to Lido Key, which I hadn't been to in quite a while -- by way of the
infamous St. Armands circle, known for its shops and leisurely night life.
It was slightly raining as we reached the parking lot, but only from a narrow
band of showers passing over and soon things cleared up nicely to let in a
gorgeous sunset over the Gulf.  Of *Mexico*, dammit.

We both took quite a few sunset pictures, but far and away the best one I got was when a seaplane came by, likely doing "fly along the coastline" tourist trips, and as it had turned around somewhere north of us and was coming back, I nailed this nice shot of them right in the middle of the remaining bright area between the clouds on the horizon. There were some substantial rollers coming in on the surf that evening, too, pushed along by a fairly brisk breeze from the northwest.

Mom had always loved the subtle color gradations we get in morning or
evening skies, and had occasionally tried to reflect that in some of her
painted artwork.  It takes a fairly decent camera and postprocessing to
avoid that low-quality-jpeg "banding" effect between very small changes in
brightness and hue across scenes like this, and I've gotten fairly good at
eliminating it in post when needed.

Next day, though, it was right back to work.  I slept one more night in the
house instead of the mini-suite hotel up the road.  Before the final moving
crew was scheduled to arrive in the morning, I was already starting to load
the car as I envisioned all that collected stuff would go into it.

The major heavy elements of the load actually only occupied a little over half of the hatch area's depth, but there was still a lot of little bullshit to pack in so it was pretty much all the way back by the time I got done. I could still leave a narrow notch in the middle so the interior rear-view mirror could still see the road and the inevitable tailgaters behind.

The outgoing trash pile that morning was the biggest I had ever put out there, but it was necessary because this was my last opportunity to get rid of the stuff that was totally junk. The trash pickup guys came by a little later, and this didn't faze them a bit -- they just flung it all into their trailer- mounted skip like it was just any other day. I guess they see a lot of this when residents or their offspring do move-outs.

Some of preparing this stuff for donation or disposal involved neatly binding
up like-kind objects and various cables, and Mom had saved a generous bag full
of old shoelaces and other lengths of cordage.  This had come in super-handy
for making the outgoing donations and even the trash far more manageable, so
at this point I'd gone through quite a bit of that bag to just keep things
a little neater for recipients.  I'm a big fan of using the black cotton
tie-line we use in theatre builds as opposed to zip-ties, as it's reuseable
and far less nasty on hands, so having the moral equivalent of that but in
white instead was really useful.

Mom also had several boxes of trash bags on hand, so I managed to get all
of this contained mostly in the "large" variant of those without having to
go out and buy a bunch of contractor bags.

So by about mid-day on January 12, the day that the administration and I had previously agreed to "revisit" the situation, I was 100% out of the house with nothing left in it. We agreed to the final walkthrough the next day. As noted in the forum posts, it was very surreal to wander through the now empty house, which had been my welcome refuge and remote base of operations for eight years of holiday seasons while Mom was living here. The only thing left today was the Comcast modem that was keeping me on the internet, but that would soon get returned at the local Xfinity store and the whole account closed out. Yes, it had been a lot of work, but taken one aspect at a time in the right order, overall it went pretty smoothly with no adverse surprises.

What was even more surreal was to reflect on how I had been traveling to
Florida for close to *30 years* all told over that same December-ish holiday
time, watching my parents enjoy their "golden years" before further decline
took over.  I wasn't so cognizant of my Dad's decline and ending, but it was
a real wrench to Mom and me to go through losing her own ability to bike, to
drive, to walk normally, to handle finances, etc.  This is what we'll all go
through eventually, and it will be worse for some geriatrics and their families
than others.  I consider myself very fortunate that despite the seemingly
drawn-out final hospice process, Mom's overall situation was relatively
simple and I was available to support her the whole time.

The next day's inspection and finalization went great; the move-in/move-out
coordinator hadn't met me before and turned out to be a bubbly, upbeat person
who walked in and even before walking around said I had done a great job on
clearing the place.  I had all the drawers and cabinets and closets open for
quick visual examination already, there was nothing left except minor items
that had been there when Mom moved in, all the keys and garage-door openers
were in one place, and evidently I had been far more thorough than many other
people she had dealt with.  Maybe that "meticulous" apple did not fall far
from the tree?  She vaguely knew who Mom was but didn't realize she had a
growing "memorial" website where I was detailing more of her life, and was
fascinated.  We closed things up and exited the place and said our goodbyes,
and other than another quick drop-in to check for additional mail, I'd be at
my comfy little mini-suite up the road for a couple more days.