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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Copabanana" data-source="post: 658450" data-attributes="member: 18958">OK. Things are a bit busy and do not know how time will work out and am exhausted. M slept almost all night on guard for his Mom, and I had to make breakfast which I normally do not do.  So toast and coffee and an orange really wiped me out. You know how it is when what little routine there is...is upended.So, just a few minutes of a break, and what do I find here: Gold and silver and coinage of the realm.I understand, Cedar. It is the coin of the realm again. The value of your mother's coinage has been debased and may no more be of value to your sister.If a time comes when no one wants your mother, your mother no longer has any relative or market value.  Only intrinsic value and if your sister does not value her mother in an intrinsic way, as it appears was the case for my own, she has no use for her.I want to say two things here. I have been perplexed as to why my sister wants all the photos, if she cares little for the actual person. And now I get it a little more. The photos are better than the person, because they do not have the encumbrance of relationship and need. They do not talk back, especially.They can be manipulated and exchanged. And especially,they can be stolen and robbed and use to hurt others (me) to avenge. And new and better stories can be made with them to rebuke and negate and kill off the original.So photos too are a system of relative value.But getting back to the coinage.  As we know, coins' value is largely symbolic, they are without any real intrinsic value.  A house, for example, like a mother, can have both intrinsic value because it has a use, or market value (relative value), because it can be exchanged for money.So, it makes a whole lot of sense, that your sister sees your mother in terms of coin, only in terms of what she can be exchanged for. And this is where it gets cruel and base:  she may be using your mother as a source of value to extract pain, envy, jealously, discomfort, guilt and all manner of other profits from you and other siblings.In accordance with your ideas, when she begins to feel that her mother coin, is no longer valuable to others; i.e. she is no longer seeing them suffer or no longer wanting to exchange anything at all for this coin that is the mother; put another way there is no existing market for your mother; the mother no longer has value to her.So we have put aside entirely the fact that we are talking about your mother and my mother who are and should be intrinsically valuable and at least at one time had use value, as a Marxist would say.Now you have brought to mind the whole related topic of the loss of value of older women generally. What they have lost in terms of our discussion, is they have lost their coinage value (exchange value).  And does it not seem as if there is now a societal conversation going on as to whether they have intrinsic or use value?So here we bring in more of what happened with my Mother. When I have more time I will look at all of it again because I find it absolutely fascinating.So here is where we get to, to the capacity of your sister to care, to love, to connect rather than to manipulate the market, to hoard and to barter.This is a very painful conversation to me. Now that I have run out of ideas.I would guess that most young women and maybe some men market themselves; exchanging their coinage value for something or other, when young, especially; when not knowing better or for ease or utility or for need, having no choice or alternative.What is painful here is trying to understand especially my own mother in these terms (not as painful is the case of my sister because I love her less, and that is a fact.)  Who does not want to be loved in the same way you love....not with words or in any other way that can be manipulated or marketed or hoarded.I want to know that my mother loved me as she died, as a mother, and that her love was a real thing, not a flash.  Crying here, I am.And now I want to add one thing: My mother never accepted, never, that she had lost any value what so ever. That was part of her rage: How dare you treat me such!!! I am of the highest of coinage, of value, as if to say.Insisting she did, at the end incontinent and toothless and almost dead. My mother was never broken. By anything. And as I write this it is much a sadness for her as a virtue.And I think that was the remarkable thing about her retaining her beauty until she died. Of course, she was beautiful.  Even dead. It was the insistence, of such, that was her real allure. She strutted her stuff into the 80's believing that she was gorgeous and investing all of the resources and time into making it so. And it worked, for her. Without surgery, without hair dye, only Chanel makeup and nice clothes, it worked, for her.And the thing I don't get really is her confidence. Having risen in her life several social classes, at least, and acquiring the polish and confidence of the well born, kind of like I see in the female candidates on TV, except infinitely more charming and warm.  And all of this because she willed it so.Wonderful post, Cedar.</blockquote>

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