A big day

Big things happened today. Sarah died. And we closed on the house.

What connects them both is more than you'd think. Both were things that had been anticipated. Both happened more or less without a lot of fanfare.

Sarah passed away in her sleep, after having fought cancer for years. At the end, she was more or less comatose, probably having to do as much with the pain medication as the cancer.

Tamara was there. She brought Smudge because she wanted Sarah to touch him, physically, before she died. Sarah, always courteous, waited for Smudge to arrive, hanging on to life, even if barely, until she could touch Smudge.

Which sounds kind of hippy dippy when I write it, but wasn't.

Tamara is a powerful person--I'm sure you know that. And Tamara feels that she wouldn't have become the person she is without having had Sarah's influence. That's why it was so important for her to have her son touch her friend. Even if the connection was only momentary, it was important for Tamara that it happen.

Apparently it was important to Sarah as well. Her brain was so full of cancer that the doctor had given her no more than a couple of hours to live before Tamara came down to see her. But she refused to go until she'd done the one last thing.

Powerful people do powerful things, even on the verge of death.

And then there's the house.

We'd put a sizeable down payment on the house and the money was supposed to have been wired from my brokerage account to the title company's in the morning. I got a call around noon that the money hadn't showed up yet.

I spent a long time on the phone trying to understand why the brokerage couldn't tell me where the money went. They'd sent the wire, but had no idea why it hadn't arrived. All they knew was that it would arrive. Eventually. And that until then, they had no way of knowing where it was.

To my way of thinking, that's completely preposterous. The money existed. And basic acounting says that you don't take money out of one account without putting it in another.

This reasoning made no sense to the guy at the brokerage. So I gave him my car analogy: A car leaves Chicago bound for New York. You may not know when it's going to get to New York, but the car is somewhere in between the two and at any point, you should be able to know where it is.

I finally came to realize that while I was operating until Newtonian presumptions, banking actually operates more along the lines of quantum mechanics.

It's almost like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal as applied to wire transfers: It may be possible to know your money's state or its speed, but not both.

I got kind of rude to the guy at the brokerage because he couldn't tell me anything except that he was sure the money would arrive by the end of the day. And I don't think I was wrong to, either. As far as I knew, $35,000 had gone totally unaccounted for.

Sure enough, he was right. The money arrived and the wheels of commerce turned, just enough for the bank to fund the loan and the house to become ours. Quietly. Without any ceremony, any sort of finality, any notice of any kind. In fact, we only know for sure that everything went according to plan because we haven't heard otherwise from the sellers, the real estate agents, the bank, or the title company.

We still don't have a key.

And I suppose that's how Sarah's death is similar. A woman goes from ill to sleeping to comatose to no longer breathing and where exactly is the line between life and death? Where exactly is the line between the house belonging to those other people and it belonging to us? Yes, a time will be ascribed to both. Sarah's death will be noted as having officially occurred at a certain time, just as ownership of the house will have passed to us at a certain time. But that time--those times--seem more or less arbitrary. The reality is that the changes of state are fuzzy, not precise. And yet they are definitive, nonetheless.

Sarah is gone; we own a house. The world moves along.