The short version is that we need to put the house on the market sometime in the next two months. I hate to leave this place – I’ve lived here for 16 years – but despite my best efforts, we can’t stay. Don’t worry; this isn’t a foreclosure situation or anything dire like that. We’re not starting over from scratch.

We could however use a little help finding a new place to live. See, we want to stay in Sellwood, or at least not move out to the sticks, and it shouldn’t be impossible to find a new place except we’ve got this fluffy, 58 lb road block.

This is Mishka. She is super awesome and exceedingly friendly and quite upset that so many landlords and rental agencies forbid renters with large dogs.

Our ideal place? A house with a yard and 2+ bedrooms, but really we’ll entertain any reasonable possibilities that allow us 2 cats and a 58 pound fluffball in tow.

Mom died last Friday, Black Friday.

My sister called that morning; Mom was in the hospital and it didn’t look good. We rushed, drove nervously down highway 26 to St. Vincent’s, race-walked the length of the hospital toward Emergency when we’d discovered we’d parked at the wrong end. At Emergency, I was shuffled to one nurse and then another, who left then returned to tell me a third person would be out to speak with me. I think I knew then. A moment later my sister appeared, face red from crying.

I’d missed Mom by just over half an hour.

Pulmonary embolism, the doctor said. She went quickly. And peacefully.

I saw her body after that. I needed to see her even though I knew it would be by far the most difficult moment of the day. You see, I was there for Dad, hand on his forehead as I watched his death rattle, standing beside the mortuary crew as they zipped up the bag for transport. I was Dad’s primary caregiver while the pancreatic cancer ravaged his body and for Mom, since I wasn’t there for her, the least I could do was have that final moment, a long goodbye even though she was already cold.

Before the senile dementia and memory loss hit, Mom was a writer. She wrote short stories, essays, radio and stage plays. She wanted, sometimes desperately, for me to follow in her footsteps.

Sometimes I did. Sometimes, I couldn’t bring myself to be Mom part two. I lashed out and followed other paths with varying success. Mom nagged me, as moms always do, and her nag was always – always – about the writing. How’s the novel? Have you finished that short story?

In the past few years, since Mom’s illness, I’ve been afraid to write. Afraid that it – the writer’s gene – was dying with her. I’d sit down to pound out an article or a short story and freeze up, certain my words would just dump out onto the page like the contents of a random fucked up junk drawer. Nuts, bolts, empty match books, rubber bands, twist ties.

This past week, cocooned with comfort food and television, I let the frustrations slough off and I began the difficult task of cataloging, of forgiving, and embracing all that I remembered of Mom, good, bad, indifferent.

And I reminded myself (yet again) that Mom meant well when she nagged me. And she was most likely right.