I’ve written about synchronicity before. The almost unbelievable juxtaposition of events that trigger a degree of disbelieving awe - at least for the secular. My mother died almost two years ago. We’ve been trying to sell her Toronto house ever since. Friday, on the birthday she would have turned 99, it sold. To another generation of immigrants, composing a new life and family in Canada. Just as she had.
The timing seems mildly miraculous because it brings to a sudden (and very welcome) halt a roller coaster ride of stressful months. A seemingly endless series of mishaps, muddlings and misunderstandings. Almost as if my mother wanted to play with us a while longer, teasing us from above (or below). Forcing us to stay engaged with the home she loved and lived in for almost 60 years - a secure haven after her tumultuous, war-torn European childhood. We moved in when I was three, and it has been ‘home’ uninterrupted, almost until 63. My childhood room - and pretty well everything else - remained unchanged across the decades.
In the recent ‘eidetics’ retreats I’ve been writing about, I didn’t need to reach very far to bring up images of my childhood home. It wasn’t a distant memory disappearing into a hard-to-ressucitate past. It remained firmly grounded in my present, a stable base to my globe-trotting and multiple homes, moves and husbands. The contrasts between my mother’s life and mine run deep. From the age of 7, my mother was forced to move many times across multiple countries fleeing the Nazis. Once she emigrated to her beloved Canada, she relished the ability to nest securely and stably.
Her daughter, securely grounded in the home she built and the love she lavished, instead spent her adulthood on the move. Leaving Toronto behind at 19, I have contentedly globe-trotted through Paris, Brussels, Geneva, New York and now London, with a short stint in Boston. My daughter, at the ripe old age of 28, has already bested my peripatetic ways with four continents under her ‘been’ belt. My son has moved on to yet another continent and is building family and companies in Africa. Yet every year, we all trooped ‘home’ to see ‘Ma’ and ‘Mamie.’
The saga of the house sale smacked of some of the tumultuous themes of my mom’s life. She had lost most of her family, possessions and wealth to war. In death, we managed to have her will lost by the executors. In 1944, she had been denounced by neighbours in Nice, friends her family had helped hide. In 2024, nasty neighbours newly moved in next door tried to milk us for $50,000 to settle a bureaucratic bug. With family origins in both Germany and France, her parents had spent much of her teens in a desperate hunt for papers and passports. In a weird echo, her house was one of the handful in Toronto that hadn’t passed into the online land registry system that the government introduced a couple of decades ago. Without the right papers, her beloved house couldn’t sell.
I’m deeply grateful she never knew about any of this. Never had to spend months talking to the lawyers we consulted, surveyors we met with, and courts we had to learn about. Never witnessed the struggles to align siblings around the price, the plan and the pacing. She would have despaired at every bit of it. I’m so relieved it’s settled, sold and… safe. In the hands of a family that has loved it from the moment it appeared on the market. And will renovate its charming (if neglected) old bones rather than raze it to the ground to squeeze in yet another ugly McMansion.
But I also am growing familiar with the hole that emerges when even the most bothersome issues disappear. Under the relief and the celebrations, the goodbye to the hassle and the costs, the bureaucracy and the paperwork, floats a tiny lashing of loss.
There is, I discover, a series of losses when your parents go. First them, then their stuff (the books!), then their home. Sometimes their whole country, culture or language. The family constellation they created and often were the central pillar to upholding. The rituals and holidays go the way of the family silver. Up to the next generations to use, lose or tuck into the bottom drawer of a basement cupboard.
I’m unlikely to return much to the country of my birth, although in the world we are living in, I’ll never say never. The country saved my mother, and made me. I owe it much gratitude, and hope it won’t be needed in my lifetime. It’s awfully cold there. But the kids have passports (even though their kids can’t), and the genes live on.
My mother has let her house go. We can all, finally, rest in peace.
Thank you for this. Beautifully written and made me cry - crying out of love, not sadness.
very moving, Avivah - thank you