We watched her crumble for over a year, until she functioned less than her patient. She collapsed in on herself, like the first tower, foreshadowing things to come. But even with all her positive thinking and her round-the-clock vigils, he didn’t get better. Instead, she got worse. My mother doted, protected like a she-wolf, with more care than I remembered her capable of. It gave him nothing in return, not even the peace of death.
Only my mother and I understood his words. It half-blinded him in both eyes so he couldn’t decipher his cheesy detective novels.
“Put them in the sell pile,” I said, feeling calluses form on my heart. I imagined bringing them to the nursing home so he could cuddle with them, or hang them on his wall like found art. He loved his clubs the way my daughter loved her stuffed animals. He had played golf every day before his stroke. Not monetary-though they were surely pricey-but emotional. Do we know any left-handed golfers?” I was thinking about their value. “What should I do with your father’s golf clubs?” my husband yelled from the garage. “The decorations from my sweet sixteen cake! Can you believe it?” The plastic Cinderella coach with golden doodads, tarnished and yellowed, sailed through the air and into the trash can. “Oh my God,” I said a hundred times, pulling another dusty memory from a shelf.
We triaged nearly a century of memories, more if we counted the family heirlooms and it felt obscene, handling their lives with our dirty hands. Everything else would go in a dumpster after the yard sale. My husband and I piled the things we wanted to keep in the living room, the things to sell in the family room, and the things to donate in the garage. Gone but not yet dead, I repeated, forcing myself to tackle another box, another closet, another drawer. The worst part of purging the contents of my parents’ house was that my parents weren’t dead.
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