Out With the Old

We've lived in this house, in these two rooms upstairs at the address where I grew up, for seven years next month. We left a spacious tri-level home in Wisconsin to be here for my mother, who at the time was eighty-five and concerned about living alone any longer. During the first five years, we watched her grow more frail, more forgetful, less able to do things for herself. Then she fell. Whether she had a stroke first and then fell or fell and in the struggle to get up had a stroke no one knows. But she has never been the same since that day. She went to a rehab nursing facility for three months during which our world turned upside down.

We reorganized the house, making the living room both a living area and an eating area. We remodeled her bedroom to add a free-standing toilet and pedestal sink to accommodate a wheelchair. We bought her a second TV for her bedroom. We bought a hospital bed, gait belts, walker, and stocked the house with every other item the rehab people suggested. We filled the freezer with prepared meals two months in advance. I left the studio where I gave music lessons in a prominent music store and moved my studio to a back bedroom at the house. None of this could have been possible without my daughter Sarah, who worked tirelessly alongside me to strip wallpaper, paint, decorate, move, sort, haul, and make livable several spaces that had served as storage for thirty years' junk.

And then my mother came home. Interestingly, she didn't want to. In fact, she argued strongly with the doctor, the nurses, us, and anyone else who would listen. That she would feel that way was a great surprise to her family since she had always dreaded living in a nursing home. But here she was, fighting tooth and nail against returning to her own home where she had lived for over sixty years, a place filled with photographs, memories, comforts that a nursing home could never offer.

Who knows what changes go on in the mind of an elderly person, particularly one who has a had a stroke. We had no choice but to try to make it work. And mostly, it has.

Since that first stroke there have been several others. We're not sure of the number because she has small ones and she's had more than a few. The result has been a steady decrease in her ability to remember people, places, events, even family members. She has settled into a world of cable TV and regular meals. She counts on things like her telephone, her electric lap blanket, now and then visits from her pastor, and, most of all, Gary who is her lifeline to the world outside her two rooms.

When we moved here, we brought far too many "worldly goods" with us. This, in spite of the fact that we rid ourselves of over half of our things before we moved. The remaining half was placed in a very nice storage unit and after scarcely a year, was joined by the furniture and considerable belongings of Gary's mother who entered a nursing home in Illinois as a permanent resident. When she died two years later, we added to our storage mountain all of the considerable contents of her nursing home room. Until a few months ago, all of that stuff sat, through hot weather and cold, both being reasons we didn't want to spend time there sorting through things. Not until recently.

A few months ago, a match was lit under our toes. I'm not entirely sure what the match was, but both Gary and I felt the urge to purge ourselves of extra trappings. For the last year, we had been sorting and donating from the things we had in our two rooms and in my studio, and those forays into clutter-diminishment had given both of us a sense of euphoria that chocolate never had. With little left inside the house to get rid of, we turned our sights to....the storage unit.

Mind you, it is the largest unit we could get. One could park a truck in it, or a small sailboat, or seventy coffins. It is large. It has furniture, dozens and dozens of boxes, an oriental carpet, off season clothing, personal effects of three generations of Gary's family, and lots of the common garden variety of junk.

As of this afternoon, we have taken seven carloads to the local Goodwill Store. Our goal is to take a truckload of the furniture there, too, and hopefully by mid-winter to scale down and trade our jumbo not-so-economy sized unit for a much smaller one.

We've learned some interesting lessons from this experience:

1.) Nothing is truly valuable in itself. Everything is relative to a memory or a person. My mother has taught me that. She is surrounded by beautiful things that mean absolutely nothing to her because the memory connection is gone. Things that once were her treasures are, for the most part, part of the scenery and no more.

2. Quantity and quality really aren't the same. Having four red sweaters isn't half so pleasant as having the one that hangs in my closet now. By its oneness, it means more to me. The same goes for all those casserole dishes, books, dvd's. Less is more and I find I am enjoying the things I have because I can focus on them instead of not seeing the forest for the trees.

3. There is a feeling of stepping closer to eternity in letting go of things willingly. You've heard the minister say at funerals, "For we brought nothing into this world, and we take nothing out of it," or more quaintly put: "You never see a U-Haul behind a hearse."

4. People are more important than things. My mother-in-law had a lovely custom in the last years that she lived alone in her apartment. She took the time to look through her own considerable belongings, and she made little piles of things for various family members, her niece, her nephews, her son, myself, friends, neighbors, former co-workers. In giving away these things that meant so much to her, she was insuring the future of not only her things but the sweet memories that were attached to them.