Inheritance

There are the things we are given, and then there are the things we absorb. The things we are given are easy to identify. They can be packed into boxes, divided among family members, listed in a will, appraised, moved from one home to another. A coat is hers and then it becomes mine. The same is true of a piece of jewelry, a chair, a handbag, a photograph. But the things we absorb are harder to trace.

They enter us slowly and without ceremony, often while the person is still alive. How a table should be set. How early one should arrive at the airport. That dinner requires cloth napkins, even when there are no guests. What must always be in the refrigerator. What one wears to dinner on a Saturday night. When a thank-you note is necessary. What is worth spending money on and what absolutely is not. Which inconveniences deserve outrage and which are to be endured without boring everyone else. The things one does. The things one simply does not do.

No one tells you that you are learning any of this. You live beside someone and, without meaning to, begin collecting their preferences. You learn what they notice, what they forgive, what they refuse, what they find beautiful, what they cannot abide. For years these seem like their particular ways of moving through the world. Then one day you discover that some of them have become yours. You cannot remember when this happened. There was no instruction, no formal handing over. At some point, what was once the way they did things became, quite simply, the way things are.

While my mother was alive, I didn’t think much about what I had absorbed from her. There was no particular reason to. She was still there, having the opinions, enforcing the standards, noticing what she noticed. After she died, I began to notice how many of those things had stayed with me.

There were, of course, the obvious inheritances. Her clothes, most particularly a collection of Chanel jackets. Her jewelry. Some of her furniture. Her handbags. Boxes of photographs and papers. These were the things that could be identified, packed up and moved from her apartment to mine. What I hadn’t understood was that inheritance did not necessarily wait for someone to die.

The clothes were easier to understand. My mother and I were almost exactly the same size, an accident of genetics that became unexpectedly practical after she died. Her dresses fit me. So did her sweaters, coats, bathing suits, beach cover-ups and pajamas. We wore different size shoes, which is more or less the only reason I did not inherit those too.

I spent nearly one hundred days emptying the West Village apartment where she had lived for eight years. Her furniture came to my apartment. Her clothes went into my closets. Her jewelry went into my drawers. Her handbags appeared on my shelves. There was something reassuringly straightforward about this part. These things had belonged to my mother. Now they belonged to me.

And then I started wearing them.

I slept in her pajamas. I wore her sweaters and her jewelry. I carried her handbags. I used her wallet. My mother had been considerably fancier than I was, but we had similar taste, and most of what she owned required very little adjustment. A lifetime of beautiful things had moved into my closet, and within a remarkably short period of time I was getting dressed in them. I had expected this to feel more peculiar than it did.

I could look down and realize that almost everything I had on had belonged to my mother, and yet I did not look like I was wearing my mother’s clothes. I looked like myself. Perhaps a slightly more polished version of myself. The jackets were better. The jewelry was certainly better. But nothing felt borrowed. Nothing felt like a costume. Her things seemed to recognize me. I hadn’t aged into her clothes. I had simply grown into them.

I had expected wearing my mother’s clothes to feel sentimental. I imagined I would put on one of her sweaters and be conscious that it had been hers, that she had worn it, that this was supposed to mean something.

The distinction between her things and mine disappeared with surprising speed. I wore her sweaters and carried her bags. Her jewelry found its way into my drawers. At first, each thing still felt distinctly hers. Over time, that feeling changed. Not because I forgot where any of it came from, but because her things had become part of my everyday life. Perhaps that is what inheritance is: something can become yours without ever entirely ceasing to belong to the person who left it to you.

And then there were the things that had never needed to change hands at all.

My mother had been going through a divorce for more than six years when she died. I had been beside her through almost all of it. I wrote the emails. I sat on the calls. I participated in the mediations. I knew the lawyers and I knew the numbers. I knew what she wanted, what she was willing to give up and where she would refuse to move. She was more stubborn than I was.

I would often tell her, “Neither option is good. You just have to decide which one you can live with.” Family Court had taught me that choices rarely arrived in the form of good and bad. More often, there were two bad options and a great deal of expensive discussion about which was worse. I said this with the confidence of someone who knew every detail and would ultimately have to live with neither.

My mother may already have known that she would not live to see the end of it. I don’t know how fully she allowed herself to know this. There are things we understand before we are willing to say them aloud.

Then she died. The divorce did not.

The lawyers kept calling. The emails kept arriving. There were still bills to pay, documents to find and decisions that apparently could not wait. Nothing about the process seemed particularly altered by the fact that the person at the center of it was dead. The questions remained. My mother did not.

For years, I had been helping my mother carry her life. I knew what she worried about, what she was trying to solve, which decisions she was avoiding and which ones she was making. I had opinions about all of it. I worried with her and, increasingly, for her. I was hardly a bystander. Still, it was her life. Somewhere beneath all my involvement was the knowledge that she was the person at the center of it.

There were periods when we worked twelve-hour days. We read thousands of pages together: legal documents, financial statements, emails, agreements, things I had never particularly wanted to know how to read but eventually could. As the years went on, the work changed. The legal and financial administration gave way, increasingly, to taking care of her. All the while, I was still running my own business. I did not think any of this was preparing me for something. I thought I was helping my mother.

Only now can I see that somewhere in all that work, I was learning how to do without her what I had always done beside her. By the time she died, I knew where things were. I knew who to call. I knew which questions to ask and, perhaps more importantly, which answers required another question. I knew enough of the machinery of her life that when it suddenly became mine to manage, I could keep it moving.

Then she died, and almost overnight, I was standing where she had been standing.

It felt less like an inheritance than a changing of the guard.

There was a strange expectation, even in my own mind, that some enormous weight would disappear. Her illness was no longer something I could worry about. The divorce litigation that had consumed so much of our lives was, in one sense, over. But there was no great clearing afterward. There was everything that came next.

The inventory simply assembled itself differently: the legal matters, the estate, the decisions, the things that had to be managed, protected, answered, finished. The problems had changed, but so had my position in relation to them. There was no longer anyone else at the center.

I had been responsible before. Very responsible. But knowing everything about a problem and being the person ultimately responsible for it turned out to be entirely different things. There is a considerable difference between helping someone carry a life and discovering that what remains of it has now been placed in your hands.

And from where I was standing, my mother began to make sense to me in a way she never quite had before.

This is a strange thing to say about someone I had known so intimately. I knew what frightened her, what made her angry, what gave her pleasure. I knew her stubbornness and her standards. I had spent my entire life beside her. I thought, reasonably enough, that I understood her.

But I had understood these things separately. It was only when some of the weight she had been carrying became mine that I began to see how they belonged together.

The things I had sometimes regarded as stubbornness looked different from where I stood now. So did her insistence on beauty, her appetite for small pleasures, her attachment to her routines, her fierce determination to decide certain things for herself. I had thought these were simply the various qualities that made up my mother. Now they seemed to have been in conversation with one another all along. The harder life pressed against her, the more fiercely she insisted upon the parts of it that were still hers.

There had been so much in her life she could not control. It mattered that she could decide what she wore to dinner, who she invited into her home, what she put on the table, what she considered beautiful, what she would tolerate and what she would not. These were not small things to her. Increasingly, they did not seem small to me either.

My mother believed in getting dressed. For most of my life, I thought this was simply part of her taste. She loved beautiful clothes, beautiful rooms, flowers, art, all the small refinements of being alive.

After she died, I understood it differently.

I found things she had written that revealed a weariness I had not fully understood while she was alive. My mother was private about her suffering. Even I had not understood how much effort sometimes lay behind the version of herself the world saw.

It made me reconsider her interest in beauty. I had thought she simply liked beautiful things, which she did. But there seemed to be something more deliberate in the way she continued to seek them out, particularly when so much else in her life was difficult.

When something is terribly wrong, there is a tendency to let it diminish everything around it. The dress seems frivolous. The flowers unnecessary. Dinner can wait. My mother seemed to understand something I am only beginning to understand now: the terrible thing was already taking enough. There was no reason to surrender the beautiful things to it too.

Beauty could not make her life less difficult, and she never seemed to expect it to. What it could do was keep difficulty from becoming the measure of her life. There was something almost defiant in her attachment to it. So much was beyond her control. She could still decide what the day would look like, what she would wear, what she would put on the table.

The terrible things did not get to have everything.

She got dressed because she was still here.

My mother believed things should be done properly. She worked enormously hard and seemed to regard this less as a virtue than as the obvious way one went about being alive. There was always a list. There was always something that needed doing. You got up. You washed your face. You got dressed. You handled it. Ideally, you also looked presentable.

After she died, this became unexpectedly useful. I emptied an apartment while dealing with lawyers, the estate, bills, paperwork and decisions that seemed to reproduce when left unattended. Grief happened alongside all of it, whether there was room for it or not. I did not feel strong or particularly capable. Mostly, I kept making lists and crossing things off them.

It took me some time to recognize the method.

It was hers.

My mother came to independence late. She had spent much of her life as part of a couple and built much of it around her family. Then, at sixty-five, while undergoing radiation treatment for stage IV non-smoker’s lung cancer, she filed for divorce. This was not, by any reasonable measure, an ideal time to start over.

She did anyway.

In the years that followed, she made a life in her West Village apartment that was entirely her own. She had her girlfriends over constantly and invented reasons for parties: The Golden Bachelor premiere. The Golden Bachelor finale. Lunar New Year. Valentine’s Day. My mother did not require much justification for an occasion. She liked her neighborhood, her routines, and the freedom of deciding for herself how she wanted to live.

What surprised me was how much she loved it. I had understood independence as something she wanted because of what had become difficult in her life. I had not understood that she might come to value it for its own sake. After spending much of her life accommodating other people, she had become rather attached to answering to herself.

I understand this better now than I did then.

While my mother was alive, it was easy to know where she ended and I began. Her opinions were hers. Her habits were hers. Her standards were hers. We could agree, disagree, argue, and leave each other’s convictions where they belonged.

Death made the distinction less orderly.

Her clothes came into my closet. Her responsibilities landed on my desk. Her habits appeared in my days. Opinions I had spent years arguing with began, rather inconveniently, to sound reasonable.

A will can account for the jewelry, the furniture, the money and the clothes. It cannot account for the conviction that flowers matter, the inability to tolerate a badly made bed, the expectation that people should behave properly, or the peculiar certainty that there is a right way to set a table.

There were, in fact, many moments when my mother handed things over. She had been dying for years, and she believed in being prepared. There were folders and binders. There were instructions. We had what amounted to drills for what would happen if she died: where things were, who to call, what needed to be done. My mother had no intention of leaving us without directions.

And then she died, and the directions became mine to follow.

She had prepared me remarkably well for what could be prepared for. What I hadn’t understood was how much else she had been handing over all along: her standards, her habits, her eye, her expectations of people and of life. She taught me to notice things, to care how things were done, to make an effort and expect one in return. She taught me that beauty mattered, that independence mattered, and that whatever was happening, there were still things that needed to be handled. There was no folder for any of that.

I had been inheriting her all along.