Overadvertised and underfunded

Mom died two years ago, after a pretty profound illness and a long period where there just wasn't much recovery. Guillain-Barre Syndrome at age 70, for the really curious. It took Dad a while to figure things out and go through his grief, but in the past four months he's reached out to a person who specializes in helping people downsize. They finally got a lot of oversized hospital and home-care equipment out, they started cleaning out parts of the house (like the garage, so Dad can now actually park his car -=in the garage=- what a concept.), he's hired contractors to start fixing all the long-neglected maintenance so that he can sell this house and move to something where everything's on one story.

They cleared out the statues and such which from the back garden. I know it sounds really stupid, but for me, seeing the back yard without any of her gewgaws - the angel, the bird bath, the iridescent globes, the little animal statues - really smacked me up alongside my head and said, "Yeah. She's gone." I've had other periods of melancholy, remembering playing games with her, doing puzzles, coloring, just generally shooting the shit. This was Mom's "grown up" home, meaning she was fully ready to make the place over as hers (and Dad's) instead of trying to keep things resale-ready. She painted every single room: faux finishes, murals, you name it. I didn't grow up in this house, but it's the house that was most "theirs" in my mind.