Another lie I wish I hadn't told

Earlier this year I lied to a dying woman. I didn’t mean to lie to her, when I said that I would attend her funeral at the Jewish cemetery in Nashville’s West End when she passed. Sharon had been dying for the last eighteen months, and was looking to me like she’d make it to January at least. Instead she passed away in November, right after the house sale failed and the car started having problems. I had used up any credit card emergency reserves on that stupid work trip to Jekyll. I didn’t make it to Nashville to see her burial.

Sharon Doochin was one of our neighbors while we lived in Lake Claire. She was older, she had a terrifying dog, and we were friends. Before she got sick - before COVID came for her in the summer of 2021 - she would park herself at the top of the lawn of doom we had in Lake Claire, and talk to me while I was gardening or landscaping. Sharon wasn’t an easy person to get along with, and in that regard she reminded me of older members of my own family. I helped her a little around the edges of her life, because at some point someone will have to help my parents, who are both just as difficult as some people found Sharon to be. I haven’t talked to my father since 2004, and I cut ties with my mom after her father died. I hope both my parents have good neighbors in the end. Just because I can’t be around them doesn’t mean other people can’t find value in relationships with them. Sometimes people and places just build up so many negative memories that it’s best to stay away.

I don’t go to Nashville for the holidays anymore, not since a therapist told me in 2020 I don’t ever have to go back to Nashville again. I kept revisiting the place on holidays because the husband’s parents are there. Every year the city became less and less recognizable, and in 2019 I found myself just driving to the parking lot of the UU church in Green Hills and just sitting in the parking lot alone. It was one of the few places that still existed in the city that I once knew, even though I was never a member. Later, my friend Jeff - the last really close friend I had in Nashville in 2019 - told me I should have gone to his house off Granny White Pike to try and chill out. It was good advice and I should have gone to hang out with Jeff that year. He moved to Chattanooga during the pandemic, and so using his house as a safe place in Nashville is no longer an option. I still know people in the area, but not in a “can I hide at your house from the goddamn holidays” kind of way.

When I told Sharon I would go to Nashville for her funeral, I saw my husband’s eyebrows go up. He knows how much I avoid the place now, and that I hate lying. I really did mean it when I told our Lake Claire neighbor I would attend her burial, but then she passed quicker than we could unload the house that made her our friend. Her family was from Nashville, and we never discussed our reasons for disliking the town in any depth. She arrived in Atlanta thirty years before I did, and neither of us ever planned on returning, and that was enough on that subject.

The house we still own in Lake Claire sits empty, and has to be winterized today. A new appraiser was engaged (again) last week and came back (again) and said the place was worth 200k more than anyone is actually willing to pay for it (again). This means that our current hopes are pinned on something called a deed-in-lieu, and that we won’t be rid of the three story disaster until 2023. The pain just keeps coming from that place, and the only neighbor I really got close to is now dead. I still have friends on the street, but not in a “let’s sit on the porch and talk shit” kind of way.

Besides, anyone in the Lake Claire neighborhood would just want to talk about what’s going on with the empty house, and the topic now makes me physically nauseous. When you tell people “We bought the place as a fixer-upper nine months before the pandemic hit, and then we couldn’t afford both repairs and the mortgage”, no one really believes you. I know they think they could have done better, that we must have fucked up royally to be in the position we’re in now.

Sharon caught COVID from a repairman who came to her house coughing just a month after she had completed the first vaccines. He gave her a variant she never really recovered from, and during her treatments the doctors found the cancer that finished her. Maybe Sharon was always going to die from the cancer she inherited from a lifetime of cigarettes. Maybe we were always going to lose money on the Lake Claire house. COVID just sped up the inevitability of Sharon’s passing and our fiscal losses, I suppose. Maybe without COVID Sharon could have lived to see us try to sell that house when the kids graduated High School, like we planned. Or maybe she was always going to die before we could sell the house that made us neighbors.

I’ll be celebrating the days off this week by going to a party with my chosen family, while the kids and the husband go to Nashville. As the only business I have in the town four hours north would be visiting Sharon’s grave, I’m happier to be in Atlanta. I will go to the Jewish cemetery in West End, the next time I go up there. But right now, I feel like Sharon would understand I want to spend the holidays in the town I made my home with my own decisions, not somebody else’s decisions for me. Sharon fought to the end to live her life her way, and succeeded. We should all be so lucky.