Olga Bo Thorp

 The hits they keep coming.  I didn't realize the breadth and scope of painting the upstairs of our home.  I made a firm decision to do what I could before entertaining the idea of selling the house.  If I made it turnkey first, then I would appreciate it later.  The hassle of having to go through your family's things, decide what stays and what goes is an intellectually and emotionally draining undertaking.  You accomplish it in waves a little at a time.  If you wait then the inevitability of an estate sale looms.  I have been to a handful of these events, and there is one this weekend beginning tomorrow.  The most significant of these was the home of the founder of the Cape Fear Regional Theater, Olga Bo Thorp.  I was friends with her son, and we played in a band together throughout college at UNC.  This friendship began in high school, when I spent time at the Thorp home.  Herbert Thorp died of throat cancer many years ago, but I also became friends with him as well.  I did a myriad of musical theater shows at the Cape Fear Regional Theater, more than I even remember.  Needless to say this musical experience was a seminal part of my growth as human being.  After embarking on cruise ship work, this relationship with CFRT became more distant.  Bo retired and Tom Quaintance took her place as full time artistic director.  His five year tenure was notable, and the shows remained stellar.  He moved on and Mary Kate Burke took over.  Bo died last year.  She disappeared from public life during Covid and stopped attending the Fayetteville Symphony Orchestra concerts.  I wondered what had happened to her.  As it turns out she was the same age as my mother, 90.  I never knew, because she never lost an ounce of spunk.  Bo was highly independent and lived in her own home until the end.  Her passing was abrupt to me.  She got Covid so they say and then had a heart attack.  She never made it to The Carolina Inn where my mother is now.  They moved some of her things over, but she decided not to go.  Instead she took a taxi to the promised land.  I attended her funeral where Holden eulogized her passing.  Like always it was an insightful, witty, and humorous elegy, but it was not enough for closure for me.  A few brief and hurried moments are not enough to commemorate a lifetime of theatrical achievement.  I knew if I did not attend the estate sale I would be angry with myself, so I went.  It was as horrid as usual.  I can think of no more upsetting, grievous, and cold practice than that of an estate sale.  It is a full life of grief wrapped up in cabbage roll and sold for twenty-five cents.  The theory is you can and should find a few items that will remind you of the good times, and I was successful at that.  I found what I needed, but the rest of it is just pure loss, looking at an empty house with everyone gone.  It is brutal, horrid, and sad.  I said in our family an estate sale was not on the docket, and it won't be.  Strangers rifling through your personal effects is like the IRS auditing your accounts.  But, and I don't usually begin a sentence with a conjunction, but not having an estate sale squarely puts the burden of that responsibility on my shoulders.  Make the house turnkey, as much as you can, while you are still living there.  Take your time, be thoughtful, and try to enjoy the work.  The reality is you must grieve before you lose your family member, because you are doing the same task preemptively before it should happen.  I fully did not realize the breadth, scope, and emotional strain of this process.  You are regressing in time to chapters that may not be pleasurable, because as an adult it is not healthy to live in your childhood.  All kinds of foibles and pitfalls lie waiting for you to help you fail in your endeavor.  The emotional commitment is necessary, but also is is laden with the sorrow of loss.  The decisions in what stays and what goes is fragile and perilous.  I have been successful with the things.  The house on the other hand is proving more challenging, because to paint you must disassemble your things, and they are not there to remind you of yourself.  It is just a bare empty room like it was when you first moved in.  This is not pleasant, but growth is painful.  Growing pangs.  I am not reliant upon things, but the reality of today is as soon as you step out of your house you are in the wilderness, and this wilderness is not supportive or forgiving.  The American environment has become a brutal test of survival, and Fayetteville with Fort Liberty in close proximity is a continued war training zone.  Who wants to live like that?  Your home and your things are all you have to reinforce your philosophy of life.  When I define out home with my musical things, it makes perfect sense and serves its purpose well.  When I lose touch with my musical side, the house is a viable nemesis full of self doubt, seeming failure, loneliness, and depression.  A gift is an outward sign of an inward spiritual grace, and your things are metaphors for your ideas, ideals, and accomplishments.  Bo's empty house is a tomb that never can be filled again, and the most fitting memorial to the Thorp family would be to gather and bulldoze that reminder into the ground.  It would be the most appropriate, heartfelt, and beneficial act for Fayetteville, because then those memories will remain good memories, not reminders of loss.