Devoted son or something else?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Disclaimer first - I don’t need advice. This situation doesn’t affect me at all, other than idle curiosity, or nosiness, or whatever you want to call it. OK?

The individual in question (G) is my husband’s 70-something cousin - an only child. I met him once a few months back - I think he may be divorced, and I think maybe he has a couple of offspring. I met his parents over 35 years ago. His father died 30-ish years ago. G helped and then cared for his mother thru her dementia till she died within the last decade or so. The mother is my MIL’s oldest sister, so that’s where I’ve heard what follows.

G has apparently maintained his parents’ home as a shrine of sorts. He doesn’t live there - the house is empty - but he does maintain the property, pay the taxes, and all that. As the story goes, his dad’s wallet is still on the dresser, still with money and IDs and all that exactly as his dad left it. All of his dad’s clothes are still in the closets and drawers. And now that his mother has died, all of her things are left exactly as they were.

As I said, this is none of my business, nor is it denying anyone a share of any inheritance. This is all going on about 1000 miles away, so I’m literally removed from it all. The house and its contents belong to G, and for whatever reason, he wants to keep it as it is. But I wonder, could that reason indicate a mental or emotional problem? Is there a non-weird reason for keeping the house frozen in time? I’m trying to understand - maybe there is no reason?

Anyone here ever encounter a similar situation?

2

Grief takes weird shapes, is my first thought. If the story is true*, I find it very sad.

*(Not saying you are making it up, just that stories from other people far away can stray a bit from current facts)

3

I don’t think it is by any means unique. My father didn’t move or get rid of anything of my mother’s until years after her death.

French soldier’s room unchanged 96 years after his death in first world war

The parents of the young officer kept his room exactly as it was the day he left for the battlefront. When they decided to move in 1935, they stipulated in the sale that Rochereau’s room should not be changed for 500 years.

4

Do you know whether the father’s things were kept in place while the mother was still alive? Maybe it was her wishes and he just maintained them?

5

I don’t know what her wishes were. But I did hear he’d promised his dad that he’d take care of his mom, which is why he never put her in any sort of nursing care - he did it all himself.

6

Story time that may be relevant:
While my late first wife was still a semi-healthy cancer patient in active treatment she and I participated in a peer support program to pair experienced patient / care-giver couples with newly diagnosed patient / care-giver couples.

We outlived a bunch of the couples we counselled / befriended / supported over those years. My wife was “blessed” with a very slow but inexorable cancer and a fierce constitution. Others lacked one or both of those advantages. What we did was valuable, rewarding, and also very painful at times.


In one of the couples ~10 years older than us the woman had started with breast cancer like my wife had but it had aggressively gotten into her brain, which is not uncommon. She went from a vigorous attractive healthy ~72yo to a badly mentally handicapped shrunken cadaverous mess in 18 months flat and died at about 24 months from initial symptoms / diagnosis. We were there with them almost from the start of this awful ride. The ~2 year older husband was naturally kind of an Eeyore character. He was utterly devoted to her care 24/7.

After his wife died I stayed close to him for the following months, during which time my own wife started her final spiral. Roughly 18 months after his wife died, mine did too. We stayed in close touch as I worked through my own challenges.

At that time, roughly 18 months after his wife’s death, her place setting was still at what was now his dinner table. Every bit of her clothes were exactly where they had been. Her car was still in the garage undriven. He was out in the world trying to meet & date, but could not bring himself to change a thing of hers. Unsurprisingly, he was having little success meeting women who liked him with his head & heart where it was: totally stuck in his late wife’s healthy past.

About 6 months after my wife died so ~24 months post-his, he stopped returning my calls, texts, and emails. I checked the newspapers & SSA for evidence he had died or killed himself. Nothing. But last we had met, nothing had changed at his house or in his mind from the week she had died. Nothing.


My wife and I met them to help show them how to live with cancer and how to find a life in the remaining normal space however small it may become. Instead they showed us how to die and recover. Or more accurately how not to die and how not to recover. I learned a lot from this experience at a time I needed to learn it.

Karma tastes very strange sometimes.


As it applies to the OP and “G”, some people have a very hard time letting go of the mission of caregiving, even when the object of that caregiving is now dead. Others simply cannot give up the mind-share their late loved ones occupied, and have fantasy conversations with them day and night day after day after day after …

Others simply cannot bear to perform the logistics of closing out a life because there is no respectful-enough way to dispose of those things. It’s not a worn-out recliner or a sticky piece of aged Tupperware. It is Dad’s recliner or Mom’s Tupperware or Wife’s pretty dress or whatever.

It’s easy to get “stuck” reliving the day after the death every day. Like the movie Groundhog Day, but not nearly as funny. IME / IMO a loner or depressive personality seems more prone to stuckness. My poor friend was badly, badly stuck. Sounds like “G” has it as bad or worse.

7

It sounds like he has separated his life from the grief, basically a partition in his mind, manifest in what you observe. He most likely lives a quite normal life outside of that, however leaving some part of himself behind and walled off in the process. It would be up to him to open up that house and take that part of himself back into the whole of him.

We all have such things, and commonly buried under so much that it takes years of things like therapy to dig up so it can heal. But that is up to him.

8

Cleaning out and selling a house is a lot of work. And yes, it’s emotionally stressful to discard your mom’s stuff. Maybe he just doesn’t want to deal with it, and he can afford to pay the taxes, and he doesn’t owe anyone else a share of the inheritance, so he’s just putting off that unpleasant task.

9

My husband and our roomie have been closing out stuff in my family house [I inherited everything, lock, stock and well even smoking barrels as it included something on the order of 24 rifles/shotguns and 7 handguns … I am the last person other than a couple cousins in my genetic line, so I inherited everything. Sigh] They did the sorting of my dad, mom and brother’s stuff [I really did not want to have any idea what my brother had on hand in his spank bank, thanks!] mrAru had been really useful sorting paperwork in his down time.

10

That might well be it. On any given day, it’s going to be easier to not deal with it than to deal with it.

If the rest of his life is significantly affected by this, or if he’s deliberately decided to keep the place indefinitely as a shrine, then something else is going on. But if it’s just that ‘clear out my parents’ house so I can put it up for sale’ never makes it to the top of his to-do list – yeah, I can see that happening. (Says the person who still has rather too many boxes of her mother’s stuff scattered around the house, nearly 20 years later – )

11

Thank you, @LSLGuy, for sharing that story.

My story is about a colleague at a partner company that I worked with a lot, about 20 years ago. One evening, he invited me and a colleague from my own company to his place for dinner. There he revealed to us that his wife and daughter had died in a violent car crash about a year prior. He showed us the kid’s room, which he had left exactly as it was. He was single now, living in the same house, and doing (IMO) pretty good work at his company. He must have partitioned off his life before / after the loss, but not fully.

And I’d like to ask everyone about this…a new “thing” perhaps that we all experience these days, but we don’t have a word or phrase for it yet: What do you do with your electronic phone / address books in your phone, PC and tablets, when a loved one has died?

I can’t bring myself to delete my big brother’s contact info from my phone. Or his wife’s, and they died about 6 or 7 years apart. I’ve still not fully processed their loss, and deleting them from the phone feels a little like deleting their memory. To add to this, I have no idea where their ashes or final resting place is. (I think their daughter has this but I’m not an active acquaintance so it’s awkward to ask.) But that’s a whole other thread I suppose.

12

I have a lot of dead people in my phone contact list. In most cases, i kinda like being reminded of them. (In the case of my mom, that’s still my reference for stuff like her estate FIN that i need.)

13

In my Outlook I have a separate archive where lots of old contacts go. Along with all my old email. Friends from living in prior cities, co-workers from companies where I no longer work, etc. That’s also where the contacts of deceased people go. (ref @puzzlegal just above, once all administrative formalities are complete).

When I archive a deceased person, I add a comment in the notes section about their date or circumstances of death, burial place, url to their memorial page if any, etc. That gets them off my phone but the data is never lost. Like the contact info for an old friend who’s since moved 4 times without telling me, the contact data is useless from a strictly practical perspective. But I’ve still got it and can look at it whenever the sentiment strikes.


Returning to the OP’s case of “G” …
A trap for any aging person is the existence of a large monolithic project that’s already darn big as you’re approaching your own dotage and decline.

Many people end up trapped living in their own large and admittedly inappropriate house with what they themselves see as excess clutter. But they lack the gumption, help, and physical stamina to deal with it. The only real fix for this problem is to admit that it will happen to you eventually, then defeat it ahead of time while you still can. Once the trap is sprung you really need a major deus ex machina to correct it.

“G” may be more in that mode than paralyzed by grief/wallowing as I suggested in my prior post. IOW, it’s not a “shrine”; instead it’s simply an impossibly large white elephant.

If so, his problem will only get worse with his advancing age, not better. The OP’s not looking for advice, but there will be a next chapter here when “G” is infirm or deceased and his parents’ house will probably still be there as-is. As will his own house.

Public service announcement: Do NOT do this to your kids. It’s selfish as hell.

14

I had not considered that possibility.

I’m with you here, as is my mom. She’s spent the last 4 or 5 years giving away stuff gradually. There will still be a lot of things to deal with when she dies, but she’s pared down a lot. I will say, quite selfishly, that I’m glad my brother is her executor.

15

My father-in-law and brother-in-law were like this when my mother-in-law died, and we, perhaps unwisely, didn’t challenge them. After my BIL died six years later, my FIL, with some gentle coaxing, allowed us to clean the house and at least straighten up their belongings, although he was still not okay with getting rid of any of it.

When my FIL died in 2020, my husband inherited everything - a hand-built adobe house on a 80 acres off the grid that’s full of furniture and personal belongings, a bunch of cars that mostly don’t run, a large collection of jazz LPs and CDs, and a valuable assortment of musical instruments and recording equipment. We’ve gotten rid of very little of it, not because we’re keeping a shrine, but because we just don’t know where to begin (and we’re stepping carefully around the question of whether this is a family homestead that is too precious to be sold or a huge white elephant that we don’t have the resources to maintain. I plan to make my kids decide).

16

I know a man whose wife passed away quite a while ago. I haven’t been in his house but close friends of his tell me most of their house remains unchanged from the way his wife always kept it, including the dining room with full settings of dishes on the table. They tell me he keeps it that way to remember his wife. His friends and I speculated on how he might deal with a life with another woman, and they offered that he might have no idea notion of how to change things and appreciate the company of someone who would relieve him of that burden.

17

Maybe he doesn’t want another relationship.

My mother outlived my father by about twenty years. She never showed any signs of wanting to remarry, or of wanting another romantic and/or sexual relationship, though she certainly had friends.

I’ve known others widowed at about the same age or older who remarried within a year or two. People vary.

18

Yes they vary greatly.

At the same time it is well-known that dating or marrying a divorcee almost inevitably includes certain baggage from their prior bad relationship and you’ll always be being compared at least a little bit to the ex-. For good or for ill.

Likewise dating or marrying a widow of either sex. The difference is most divorced folks intensely dislike their former spouse while most widows idealize their dearly departed spouse. So the new BF/GF is still compared to, and is sorta competing with, the late spouse, but in a radically different way than with an ex-spouse.

Anyone visiting the home of their widowed date who found a static shrine to the dearly departed there would be rightly worried about whether there was any room in the widow’s head or heart for them too. Despite what the widow might say about their readiness or indeed eagerness to move on, their actions belie their words.

Expecting your new BF/GF/SO to want to help you close out your stagnant mental and logistical relationship with your late- or ex-spouse is asking an awful lot very early in a would-be relationship. And is probably a very off-putting thing to dump on most such prospective SOs.

19

All of which is one reason why I think the person in question may not be interested in a new relationship. In which case, they wouldn’t be expecting the new person to do any such thing; they’re just not expecting, or desiring, any new person to step into that role.

20

Sure. Knowing as I did for some years that my wife would die at some future date while I was still comparatively young, I thought a lot about whether I wanted to stay affirmatively single afterwards or actively seek a permanent relationship or just play life by ear & see what happened or what? I’m hardly alone in that.

And even now, having made my choice, I still occasionally wonder about the road(s) not taken. As do we all.

The fellow I talked about in post #6 was an example of a guy who totally wanted a new GF/SO. Was actively using the singles websites, etc. When we met for lunches the GF search was his prime topic of conversation. But at the same time his home was a shrine to his late first wife and so was much of his mind & as best I could tell, all of his heart.

He was duly failing in attracting or keeping the women he claimed to want. I think they were off-put largely by the obstacle that they’d have to go through his late wife to get to him. That was the predominant topic I was trying to talk about here in my last couple of posts