Will to Believe

As told to Leba Friedman

It was just after the shloshim for my mother, and reality was setting in. While in deep mourning and very much still processing our loss, my siblings and I had to take care of many important details, such as going through her house and executing her will.

Over this period of her death, I was feeling a bit low and unconnected spiritually. While I groped for ways to climb out of the slump, I didn’t have the luxury of emotional space to figure out how to move forward. There was too much to do.

My mother’s will contained some complicated conditions, which dragged out the distribution of her assets and made it more expensive than it needed to be. We wanted to respect her last wishes, but we thought there must be a way to simplify the instructions she’d left us. A call to our lawyer, however, confirmed what we’d all dreaded hearing: “You can change it, but you’ll need the original will, not a copy of it, in order to do anything.”

My mother was a person who valued — how shall we say it — stuff. The house in which she’d lived alone had 13 rooms, each one of them quite literally filled to the brim. There were books of all kinds, clothing she’d bought for this one or that one, knickknacks she was saving for her grandchildren, gifts she’d bought or received. Mom’s collection had accumulated over many years. Never once had she had a “decluttering session” or a garage sale. She parted with only a select few possessions and only at rare intervals.