Remains of a life

Remains of a life

As we continue to sort Mom's house, discarding some, taking some home, setting some aside as donations and some to sell I am struck by a few things.

She was quite organized, not to the point of OCD. She had things put away carefully. Her financial records are easy to go through. Her personal effects, equally easy to sort. Her eldest son did not inherit this tendency. My filing system tends to be piles that eventually get moved into boxes.

At the same time, it is easy to see she forgot what she had. Some stuff was put away when she first moved into the house and never touched again. Sometimes, she'd mention these things in passing, wondering where they got off to. Never seriously concerned enough to go look for them.

I already knew she was forgetting. Not dementia, but just age that causes us all to forget. She had a safe she could not open. She swore the safe held things it did not. The third time we unpacked the safe, I recorded everything with the video recorder on my phone. Everything. She continued to insist the previous two searches never happened.

I figured it was only a matter of time before she wanted to unpack everything again. Instead, I'd show her the videos as proof we did the search and came up empty handed.

The 4th search never happened. Never will now. I am sad that we won't go through the safe again and happy that I have at least some video of her. 

She hated having her picture taken.

As her stuff is sorted into piles, I look over things. I am seeing the remains of a life. As a writer, I see stories of triumph and tragedy, change and dogged determination to resist. As her son, I see myself (literally me in some pictures) in what she kept, like my elementary school student achievement book. As a brother, I see Shag in these things too. As a human, I see pictures of her, Dad, Shag and me. None of this childish defacing the picture to excise Dad.

I see what she treasured, at least in terms of material things, I see what didn't matter by the conspicuous absence of other stuff. 

I see things others cannot because she and I lived them, together, just the two of us.

Sometimes, me or someone else will grab something and wonder "Why did she keep this?" The answer is simple. It brought her pleasure to see it, to hold it, to have it. Her porcelain hummingbird collection is one of those pleasures for her that mean nothing to me. These things, we are selling. Either direct through an estate sale or through a shop in downtown Ashburn. I hope someone will buy and enjoy that stuff as much as Mom did. 

I find things I want to keep. Some I hang on to. Some I just don't. Her name tags from her jobs. I want them, but why? Her jobs did not define her. I let it go. Who will want them after I am gone? No one. It will just be more stuff to throw away and whoever has to clean up after me will have plenty of that already.

I am also thankful she was not a hoarder. Last year, about this time in fact, I was south of Tallahassee several times a month cleaning out the home of a hoarder. Call the hoarder J, who was also Mom's best friend. J had straight up piles all over the house with barely enough room to walk through them. We filled a roll-off dump trailer twice with debris.

We've ordered a dump trailer for Ma's house, mostly for the yard trimmings we have to get rid of as we trim the hedges. Part of the work to get the house ready for sale. I'm rough guessing here that actual trash in the house is less than a two roll out carts and almost all from trash cans in the house. Sure, we're tossing more, but it doesn't qualify as trash. Call it the detritus of a life instead; detritus is a vital component of a healthy forest. 15-year-old tax records, some lightly stained clothes, now expired food, etc. are going into the dump.

Some people are wondering how I'm doing, especially as I go through the house. Some anger, as expected. Some sadness, as expected. But for the house, nothing really. I was not invested in the house in any way. Didn't grow up there. She only lived there for about 10 years or so. It was her home, but not mine.

We were there Sunday. Danielle came over and brought Bolt, her dog. He would not get out of the car until I coaxed him out. He was not happy going into the house. He climbed on my lap when I sat down and looked up at me softly whining. D. has kept Bolt since the accident and now will spend his remaining years there.

"Yeah, I know Small Dog. But she's not coming back."

The house increasingly is just a structure, hollow, void and empty. Bolt understood this. The house is just a place to keep stuff, as George Carlin observed years ago. What makes it a home is the people who live there and how you feel about them.

Without Ma there the place, to explain the whys, whens, whats, whos and hows, it's all just stuff. It is the remains of a life and it grows increasingly cold and distant without her to animate it. Memories, shifting, fragile and unreliable, are nothing more than a poor version of life support that must also end some day.