I’m a little behind in posting, and there’s a reason. My mom died on Saturday, and anyone who has been through the death of a loved one knows that there is much to do to make arrangements at the exact time when your head and your heart are most impacted.
Last week my column was about going through my mom’s things, since she had committed to the nursing home room versus her small home. I’m including that post below. Then I’ll post the column for this week that reflects a little on her death.
Sifting and Winnowing
I’m taking a break right now to write this. My sister Anna and I are going through our mom’s house, now that she has decided to stay in the assisted living room she’s inhabited since early spring. Again and again Anna and I comment that the move from the big house to the little house we’re now cleaning out reduced Mom’s inventory of belongings considerably. And yet, there’s still so much.
Mom came over yesterday via wheelchair to direct our work, and answer some questions, but she mainly doesn’t care what goes where or to whom. She has some of her belongings in her assisted living room (there isn’t room for much), and while I suspect that many of things still in her house have meaning for her, she has the wisdom to know that it’s just stuff.
Our sister Nancy was here a few weeks ago to start the process. My mom’s helper has also done some culling of canned goods and such. My mom has always enjoyed shopping, and continued to buy groceries well beyond the time she could safely cook with them.
Going through cupboards we’ve found food that had “best sold by” dates that passed during the Clinton administration. Some items seem to pre-date that era. When Cheese Whiz is brown, that’s a bad sign.
This is hard work. Not physically hard (though we haven’t moved the furniture yet), but emotionally hard. My mother has lived a pretty long life, and in some ways I think she’s comfortable to be jettisoning most of her worldly goods. I’m not quite so comfortable. All these things were part of her life, and now they aren’t. Over the years her life has moved from a rich tableau of travel, gardening, cooking – which she really enjoyed – and spending time with my dad, to sitting in her room waiting for the next mealtime, and visiting with her kids, when we can make it to Oshkosh.
She faced her mortality back in November, and I guess we all did. I think she’s still having some good days, quality of life-wise. The nursing home provides activities that she enjoys, and honestly, before her fall and near-death from an infection last fall, she mostly sat and watched TV anyway. She has much more social interaction now than she has had for years.
This isn’t the house I grew up in, or the one after that, and much of what’s here wasn’t around when we lived at home, so it doesn’t hold any special place in our hearts. As part of a nursing home complex, getting this house was itself a step towards old age and the end.
And, if I think about it, those few items that do matter are only special because of Mom, and as the rest of her life plays out, the things she leaves behind will be a poor substitute for having her with us.
Mostly, I guess the hardest part is that distributing our mother’s worldly goods holds with it the obvious implication that she’s not expecting to spend a lot more time in the world. That underlying feeling makes the decisions about who gets which figurines or end tables seem pretty unimportant.
There are rich life lessons in what we’re doing today, but they are so deep and enormous that I’m not even going to try to deal with them. I just remind myself that this is natural and good, and it is good to be here helping. Speaking of which, I think my break time is over.
Peter Wallace Writes 