Moving out, moving on

The phone calls still come.

The messages have stopped though.

It used to be I’d ignore the answering machine to my parents’ landline for a few days and suddenly there’d be ten or more messages. Mostly scams, bills, prescription notifications, and occasionally the one real message.

Like the one that asked my mom how she was doing, why she hadn’t heard from her in so long, and that they really need to talk again soon.

I hate delivering bad news. But I do it. Whether it’s responding to Christmas cards. Emails. Phone calls.

And then I delete the messages.

But more return.

But there are less. I mean fewer. But ‘less’ sounds better. But ‘fewer’ is correct. And these grammar details have rarely ever mattered but I care about them because it helps keep me a little grounded and away from my feelings.

We all have our ticks.

So there are less. There are five messages. Then four.

And then two.

It has stayed at two. Because I don’t delete them. There’s something about the ‘0’ staring back in my face that frightens me.

Again, we all have our ticks.

The house is slowly changing. Most of it is me cleaning stuff out, throwing things away, donating others, recycling the bits I can.

It’s weird, cleaning out a place that you simultaneously live in, because the goals are at opposing ends.

I have to cook to eat, but I try to cook less because I don’t want to create new garbage to clean up. But, that’s what it takes to eat. I have to clean up. I have to dust. I have to wash.

Life on its own requires maintenance. I can think I wasted the whole day away when in reality I spent the whole day on maintenance. Doing dishes. Paying bills. Doing laundry. Cleaning the yard. But it still feels like I’ve done anything. And I wonder again, how does anyone have time to do anything?

I understand now why people hire cleaners. I’m still against it, for the record.

I remember that I’m supposed to be writing about caregiving and Alzheimer’s but lately it’s all just been about grief, which I guess is what Alzheimer’s really is. Prolonged, expectant grief.

It makes me think about Christmas, and how my family used to sit at the dinner table—the one I still have which I use as my writing table, my desk. My mom would set up a bunch of candles—advent candles, I later learned—and we’d light another one each week. Each one signified another thing to look forward to, all leading up to the birth of Jesus—it itself, an event that was longed for and expected.

At least that’s how the stories go.

These are the things I think about as I clean the house. Each item full of little joys, memories, and goodbyes. Each of them is a whirlwind of emotion, even if it’s just a tiny little thing. Like a pillow. A pillowcase. My old violin when I was five. I wonder if I should keep any of these things, but why on earth keep a pillow case?

Ticks. And quirks.

The reality is these objects have little meaning in themselves. They’re markers, markers for my brain to easily recall those memories instead of having to recall them on its own. But really, the memory is the thing with meaning. And I’m afraid I will forget those memories if I throw away the marker. But still, it’s a risk I have to take.

I choose instead to spend a moment bringing to life those memories attached to those markers. I borrow what I think is from Marie Kondo (because I’ve never watched or read her stuff), and I give thanks to those objects and markers for what they meant.

And then I say goodbye to them.

There’s a boy who comes over who I’ll call Sam. He has some design sense, and he talks about how he can see how beautiful the house could be if this thing was over there, if that was repainted over, if there was a plant in the corner.

This gives me both pain, and hope. Because it means that someone else can come along and make this place their own.

And that’s the goal, isn’t it? I don’t want to be here forever. I don’t even want to be here now.

But letting go is hard.

Hope, is hard.

Another friend tells me that moving on is hard, because everyone asks you “How are you doing?” in the days, or months, after someone passes away. But after a year so, the questions stop. Which is weird, because the grief doesn’t stop. It manifests itself in new ways, like the second holiday season without them, the third birthday without them, the inability to share with them a future home, marriage, friend, any future memory, where the only way to share that with them is to pray and hope for some form of unproven connection to those who have passed on.

It’s hard enough for us to care about others, especially in ways that can be genuinely awkward, uncomfortable, and vulnerable. And this makes me promise myself that I will ask all my friends, “How are you now?”

It has now been six months since my mom went her own way. The time I’ve spent in the house is the time I’ve needed to get used to the shock and to move on. I’ve packed away the few markers I want to keep, and I promise myself to also keep the things that my mom invested into me more than I will keep the objects and memories. Like how I will keep playing piano, more than keeping the specific piano itself.

I take even more drastic measures. I empty out entire rooms. I make phone calls. I enlist the help of friends.

A relative comes to take one of the large cherrywood tables that was important to my mom. My relative is family, so he knows of the furniture’s meaning.

Some things I donate. Clothes. Bags of household items. Small furniture pieces. It’s like a little game where I put stuff on the sidewalk and hope they’ll come take it away and I’m overjoyed to come home and find the sidewalk empty. I have been fortunate enough to experience excess, and I hope the things we give away can help somebody else now.

I try to sell other larger pieces of furniture. A couple comes to pick up some bookshelves—tan, a mixture of wood and particle board, and it comes in a set of three.

“Were these your parents’?” one of the women asks me. “They look like they’re from another era.”

“They are,” I say.

“They’re in great condition! This will match our other shelves so well, and I can see putting all of my books here.”

The other woman laughs, and it the laugh I can sense that she’s glad that the books that have been strewn throughout their home, will finally have a home of their own.

I don’t say more than that.

I do smile, though, because these bookshelves are now in the hands people who love them, people who will give them new life. They may now know what the bookshelves meant to my parents. Hell, I don’t even really know. But still, they get to give it new life.

That’s how life goes on. By giving things away. And that’s what I do.

And suddenly the house is now pretty much empty. It looks like someone only barely lives there, which is exactly what’s going on. It’s starting to change, it’s being prepared for something new. And now it’s time for me to think about what’s next for my own life.

Honestly, this frightens me and weirdly sometimes I don’t want to leave the house. Typical loss aversion; you don’t want to leave something you know you should, because you worry that if you give up the ten percent of what is good, you’ll lose everything. This is almost never true, and if we would just let go, we’d give ourselves the chance to pursue so much more. But letting go is just so damn hard.

But I decide, it’s time to do that. It’s time to do what’s next.

The phone calls still come. There are no new messages.

We've had this phone number forever. I remember the exact number, the digits. I remember so few phone numbers since they’re all stored on my phone now. I know my own. My brother’s. One of my childhood friend’s. My mom’s.

Which, is now gone. I’ve gotten rid of her cell phone. Finally.

And now it’s finally time to finish everything else.

I continue playing Marie Kondo and I tell my mom and dad “thank you” for everything. For the material objects they bought me, the same way I bought things for them. The piano. The stuffed animal doggy. The socks.

For the years of my life. For the experiences they pushed me to have. For the love they gave me, whether it was emotional or dutiful or something else entirely. It doesn’t matter. I tell them “thank you.”

And then, I say goodbye.

I cancel the cable TV. I remember my dad watching cable news every night and me getting pissed off about everything. I say goodbye to that.

The two messages on the answering machine. I delete them, and stare that ‘0’ in the face.

“No new messages,” the machine blares.

The phone number itself—the number we’ve had since before I was brought into the world—it’s next.

It’s time to say goodbye.