Greetings, friends. (XXXIX)

Greetings, friends. I… well, I should just start with a content warning:

This post is mostly about dysfunctional family relationships but also about what might have been a bucket of aged urine. Please don’t continue if you are squeamish about either topic.

As I may have mentioned, my purpose in spending half my time in New Hampshire for the foreseeable future is to work together with my sister to sell our late mother’s house and generally wind up her estate.

I also may have mentioned that our mother was, shall we say, a collector of things, so this is no small task. Broadly, the job involves touching every last object in the house to determine if we wish to keep, sell, donate, or discard it.

I am being conservative when I say there are at least million objects in the house that require at least a cursory evaluation. Some are pin sized and some are massive pieces of furniture weighing hundreds of pounds. Nevertheless, each object must be touched (if only in aggregate), assessed, and some action taken, even if it’s just to throw it into a garbage bag bound for the town dump.

We are under some time constraint. As I have also mentioned, our real estate agent has strongly recommended we get the house on the market in early April. So the clock is ticking.

Adah proposed that we take the approach of clearing each room, one by one, of everything that can be immediately dealt with — basically anything but furniture or other objects actively in use. As her spring break doesn’t start until next week, I have this precious week to get a head start.

Last night, I decided to get started in earnest with the downstairs bathroom. Although every cabinet was crammed full of stuff (and then some), as a starting task the bathroom is the smallest room in the house, and therefore the most straightforward to “clear,” in Adah’s sense.

So I went through and discarded all the half used medications and skin cream jars and what not, and gradually whittled it all down, while I talked to Besha on the phone. One of the last objects I unearthed was a roughly 7 gallon white bucket labeled SHAW’S READY-TO-USE BUTTERCREAM FROSTING.

Whatever was in the bucket was heavy, but I had a bad feeling it wasn’t buttercream frosting. So I tentatively cracked opened the lid… and was immediately assailed by an unrecognizable but nevertheless terrible stench. Inside was a slightly tinted liquid with what looked like dark sediment at the bottom.

I closed the lid as quickly as possible, and made sure it was sealed tight. I gathered up all the garbage and walked away. I was done for the night.

Of course, I couldn’t leave this bucket of… whatever it was… indefinitely. I had the sense that it was organic, and, even worse, I had a feeling I knew what the bucket contained.

My mother’s expert interest in 18th Century clothing extended to experimentation with traditional textile dyes, including indigo, which can produce clothing with a rather vibrant blue color. She spent enough time testing indigo dye methods that, twenty years ago, she wrote a treatise on the subject which I have found cited elsewhere on the Internet. To quote my mother on the subject:

There are many modern recipes for indigo vats, but the traditional indigo vat is a fermentation process. In its most basic form, all you need is natural indigo, stale urine, and a good cozy spot with a comfortably warm temperature for the fermentation.. The urine provides both the nutrients to nurture the bacteria which reduce the indigo, and also the ammonia which creates the alkaline solution.

Now I don’t know that this was a bucket of urine intended for another dye experiment. There was also no way to know how long it had been there. It’s been a long time since she was mobile enough to deal with anything this heavy.

I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t want or need to know what it was. I just needed to get rid of it.

Down the toilet drain was the obvious destination, especially with the toilet so close to hand. I figured, whatever was in the bucket, it definitely seemed fermented, so it was probably organic, or at least unlikely to cause havoc in the septic tank.

The problem was how to get it there. The astute among you will recall that 7 gallons of water weighs a good 50 pounds. I did not rate among my physical skills a strong likelihood that I could empty 7 gallons of… whatever it was… into the toilet bowl without splashing a good deal of it, and I fervently did not want to do that.

In the dining room, in my mother’s hearth — I have not mentioned that she had a traditional brick hearth in the dining room, but there you are — I found a deep brass ladle with a cast iron handle.

So I got some surgical gloves and a face mask, took the ladle, and stripped down to get to work. I did not want to get a drop of… whatever it was… on anything I valued. If a mishap occurred, a hot shower and lots of soap would be only steps away.

The less said about that task, the better. Suffice it to say, I emptied the bucket into the toilet without mishap, and without apparent injury to the plumbing. I cleaned up what blessedly little there was to clean up, and then I noticed something. I don’t have a good before photo, but the after photo is something else:

The ladle went into this job pretty tarnished, and came out… surprisingly shiny. Which suggests that my original hypothesis might have been correct, because it is well-known that ammonia can be used to clean brass.

I don’t know how to reckon with the fact that my maternal inheritance, which in some ways is meaningfully substantial, also included a literal bucket of piss.

I loved my mother, and I will miss her, but right now I am consumed with rage at the insane amount of work she left us to do in her wake. We begged her repeatedly to come to grips with her mortality, and deal with the vast quantity of possessions she had spent her life accumulating. And she selfishly refused. And now I am cleaning up my literally toxic relationship with her.

I can only hope that I have front-loaded the most disgusting task I have to undertake in this entire godforsaken ordeal. I described the whole thing to Adah over the phone, and I could hear her shrug as she said flatly, “Well, that’s your fair share. Sorry, I got nothing for ya.”

Then she added, "At least you now have something to write about for 15 minutes!"

My sister was correct on both counts, and she was not being unsympathetic. She was stating a fact. For six or seven years, as our mother descended very slowly into terminal illness, Adah and Keith schlepped and cleaned and shopped and chauffeured for our mother, while I hid out on the West Coast.

My sister was not unsympathetic nor incorrect. She was stating a fact. For six or seven years, as our mother descended very slowly into terminal illness, Adah and Keith schlepped and cleaned and shopped and chauffeured for our mother, while I hid out on the West Coast.

I did this quite deliberately, for my own preservation. I could not spend 48 hours in my mother’s company as an adult without one of us, usually me, shouting at the other. My mental health has never been excellent. To have had to spend more than a few days at a time here in my mother’s latter years, as she became more obstreperous in her perpetual discomfort, would have absolutely shattered me emotionally.

But Adah and Keith stuck it out. My little sister is, quite honestly, tougher and more resilient than I will ever be. I admire her for it, and I can never repay her for the service she did our mother.

So, in some sense, when I am painfully ladling out a bucket of what might be fermented urine, while wearing nothing but a face mask and a pair of gloves, what I am really doing is hopefully earning the privilege of having a sister who chooses not to write me off for the rest of our lives for halfway abandoning her to our mother as Mom declined.

I’m actually kind of tearing up as I write this, so I better wrap this post. I only have to say that, if you have children, please think of what they will have to go through after being bereaved… and don’t do to your kids what my mother chose to do to me and my sister. If you can possibly avoid it, don’t leave them to clean up your goddamned bucket of stale piss, metaphorical or otherwise.

I’d like to end this post on a more cheerful note, because being here to deal with the aftermath of my mother’s life isn’t all bad. Look, I found Mom’s cornuthaum!

If you’re reading this… ugh, I’m sorry. Thank you for listening!