No Lights!

Note: this is an excerpt from An Ordinary Death: Where Grief and Relief Hold Hands, available from Amazon.com. 

“Christy, did you know there are no lights in this house?”

Thanks to the incredible, overwhelming, humbling generosity of my sister and brother, I am now the owner of the place we call “The Manor.”  It’s the house my mother designed and she and my father built in the 1980’s. As of Tuesday, it has become the home of a good friend of mine and her husband as they will lease it for the time being.

So, yesterday evening, she phoned with what will be the first of many landlord issues for me:  the air conditioner making an awful noise.  As we were talking about scheduling a service call, she made the remark above.

Oh my mother, how her legacy lives on!  She hated ceiling lights.  I said, “My mother was aware that ceiling lights are extremely unflattering to the skin tones of older women and refused to put them into the house.”   There are good quality ceiling fans in every room.  Not one of them has a light on it. Not one. I mentioned one room that did have some lighting around the perimeter, and that there were undercounter kitchen lights and the hallways and bathrooms and some closets were actually equipped with ceiling lights. Apparently, that wasn’t too much help their first night there when the movers didn’t finish unloading the truck until after 10:00 p.m. and nothing was unpacked and there were NO LIGHTS!

I realized after making that comment that my sister and I have followed our mother’s path here.  Both of us have multiple table lights scattered all over our houses, but rarely, if ever, turn on ceiling lights.  We are, after all, women of a certain age.

My mother’s legacy lives on in another way as well.  She had a gift for making friends and everyone loved her–her kindness and sweetness touched people.  One of the reasons she was able to continue to live in her house until the end of her life is that her neighbors took very good care of her and helped her when she needed it.  Her neighbors across the street, Paul and Clementine, become both friends and lifelines to her.  They checked on her daily and enriched her life with good conversation and meals out together. I often described Paul as “an angel temporarily clothed in human flesh” as he can and does repair anything with amazing skill and expertise.

So, after I arranged for a service call for the air conditioner, I phoned Paul and said, “I am my mother’s daughter!  Could you go over there and see if there is an easy fix to the problem?”  This dear man immediately said he would as soon as he got back home.  Three hours later, he phoned.  He’d found the problem, which was no big deal, fixed it, and all was well.  I cancelled the service call and thought, “Mother, your body may have passed on, but your legacy is alive and well!”

There may be NO LIGHTS in the house, but there are indeed lights all around us.  “Thank You, Jesus, for being the Light of the World.  May I follow Your light every step of my life.”