My son and I took a major step this last week. We got a friend to help get rid of two big nasty-looking sofas in our family room. We had gotten them second-hand a few years ago, and they had enough stains on them to start a whole new strain of microbes. Now this breakthrough has occurred, perhaps we will get up off our behinds and clean the rest of the house.
This is a side of mourning that may not be discussed enough. It’s one thing to get on with your life and go out in the world, but it’s quite another not to clean up the house you come home to. It’s not like I want to get rid of things that remind me of Janet. It’s the junk covering up the memories that’s the problem.
I watched my father go through this almost sixty years ago when my mother died of pancreatic cancer. He continued to wash her panties, fold them and put them back in the drawer for weeks. Finally one of my brothers took all of Mother’s clothes out, asked her sister and my father’s sister-in-law to come over to pick out what they would like. My father blew his top, mostly at his sister-in-law. I tried to tell him my brother gave her the clothes.
“She should have known better,” he retorted.
My father was always my role model. Anything he did I did the opposite, and it’s worked out pretty well. (I know, I should be more respectful, but I’m almost 70 years old and if I want to be a jerk about my father I think it’s my own business. Anyway, that’s another story.)
Janet’s clothes moved on to benefit other people a year ago. Everything else is piling up and I am in fear of becoming a hoarder. It should be simple. Create four piles—what I want to keep, what I want to sell, what I want to give away and what I want to throw out. After throwing out the two monsters, we moved a sofa from the living room to the family room, and each room looks better for it.
What’s holding up the sale of much of the stuff is that my cell phone can take pictures but I can’t e-mail them to my computer and thereby post them on local rummage sale websites. I either have to get a new phone or a digital camera. This should not be a major stumbling block, but it has become one for me. It’s part of the painful yet simple process called thinking. Even now it’s hard to think about anything but the fact that Janet isn’t here anymore.
There’s no deadline, however. I suppose everything will get done in its own good time.