There is a loneliness to add to the melancholy when emptying out my father's apartment. But I prefer to do it myself, because I get peevish too, and peevishness I don't want to share. More than that, there's an anger. It's a chance to be dark, and that's one reason I like doing it by myself.
Went in today and loaded his computer and printers and monitor and scanners and all that into the truck, then a few more pieces of furniture. The place is a mess, previous visits having passed through like storms, tearing loose leaves off the trees. I went through some of the leaves too, and determined a lot of it, most of it, was good for nothing but recycling.
It's quite interesting. We keep things, records, mementos, lists, notes, useful items. But when we are gone, they are suddenly of no use at all. Whoever we left behind has to go through them and find them and discover yet again how much material we surround ourselves with that really has no intrinsic worth.
Some of that is technological. Remember the little cloth rings that strengthen punched holes in paper so they don't tear out of binders so easily? I threw away boxes of those ... and sticky labels, and print-it-yourself custom sleeves for floppy disks, and cassette tapes, OMG! Dozens of cassette tapes. To hell with going to Goodwill, I am in get-it-done mode. Plastic recycle here, paper recycle there. Tapes and CD-ROMs, gone.
I did keep the VCR tapes, because a) a relative took the time to box them and b) somewhere amongst them there might be gems. Who knows? A film-to-tape version of some old home movies, perhaps, or maybe that Ian McKellen version of Richard III I gave him years ago and that I've always wanted to see. They are stacked in storage with the music CDs and the DVDs for later filtering.
And the reel-to-reels? I'm reluctant to throw them out too. Someone made a comment about a story Dad used to tell, and that he taped it once. Of course it was a story I never heard, only the children who lived with him did. But until I can correlate his tapes list with the tapes, I can't discard any. So they, along with the player, will come out this weekend. Hopefully that filtration pass won't take long.
I have the phonograph records in storage already. Ironically enough, the items he didn't value enough to take to his last home are the ones I've kept since that last move. The stuff he did want to keep with him is now getting treated with somewhat less reverence.
Well, but he kept everything. Everything! In random glances I have found his IQ tests from the late 1930s (~145), all the correspondence related to his hiring at California Research Corporation (later Chevron Research) in the early 50s, his father's passport, various death certificates, manuals and all the other paper that comes with appliances (printers to alarm clocks to reclining chairs), and printouts of everything, even blogs I wrote back when I told him where they were.
After awhile, after shoveling through all this crap, I got peevish. More so when I idly imagined the ex-step-brother appearing at the memorial. Evidently he asked when it was. No one has told him to my knowledge. If he appears I will refuse him entry. Would probably enjoy that, hence the long angry reverie while pawing through stacks of paper and hauling computer equipment. What'd he do? Well, after he got married he lived near his mother awhile, and evidently she and the wife didn't get along. She said something, I don't know what, and the son cut her off from access to him and to her only blood grandchild. So far as I know, the kid, now a teenager, doesn't know his grandmother. I don't respect shunning like that, and it breaks her heart. Secondly, he didn't go to his sister's wedding. I had a chance to ask him why a few years later and he said it was because she chose my father rather than theirs to give her away. My feeling about all this is that his wife, the daughter of a Southern Baptist minister, has decreed who is and who is not allowed to be family, and he's a weak man and goes along with it. That's my guess. Pisses me off.
Perhaps that anger is a foil for the anger I sometimes still poke at as a not-entirely-grown-up child. Dad didn't spend much time with me and I am still pushing myself through my own development to become the man some guidance might have made me. The anger itself faded away some years ago, of course. As he became more dependent, it seems forgiveness silently passed through like a gentle rain, leaving things unexpectedly cleaner than they had been. Going through his stuff, I find the remains of a richer life than I had known of, and of course I wonder, well, what are my kids going to think of me? I don't spend enough time with them either. None of us ever do, though, do we?
One more weekend, hopefully just three trips, and done. Done with the emptying part. Not done with the going through boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff part, but that can take longer. Ex-wife wants to help, so I will let her, once anyway. And then! Finally, end of month, done with the assisted living place, and onward with the next phase. (Phases, which are under way, as today also included lawyer and broker visits, and the clock is ticking on the memorial gathering, and so on ... and my real life is too full of really good stuff for me to have much time for this, actually, so looking forward to getting through with it.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
This, plus consideration of the mountains of stuff my mother has accumulated in her tiny home (near hoarder status, she), gives me thought to go through my own stuff as though I were moving into a smaller place thus throwing away the boxes of cloth donuts and boxes of old business cards and the box filled with pens collected from banks, from trade shows, from my old company, from random finds in packing off the kids to their adult lives ...
I go through those imagined encounters, too, to feed my own peevishness. I find I do that usually when my menses is imminent, rather than at other times. I suppose it would be triggered any time things in our lives and bodies are out of whack. Or our hormone levels fluctuate. Do guys' levels of estrogen cycle the same as women's? Is that an emotional trigger for guys?
As I told you not so long ago, I am glad for my sake I do not have to endure what you have to endure, and yet ... sometimes ... I wish I did. I wish I did get to be the one to go through my father's stuff and deal with the emotions in a real time. Because I don't know the next time I'm going to burst out with irrational melancholy triggered by something that makes me fill with regret about losing the opportunity to grow close to a man who never let me get close.
Anyway. Hug. Hug hug.
Not the genealogy! I have accumulated all the various dead relatives' material. I didn't GAF until I was at least thirty, and in the case of some branches I was the first one who had cared for decades. If you truly discarded it, don't tell anyone, because some child or grandchild or great-grandchild will be really pissed off at you if they find out.
(Make ya feel guilty yet? :-) )
When I was a Presbyterian my church-mates told me shunning was a common practice amongst Southern Baptists, and I know my dad's second ex's son has swallowed their whole interpretative system and no doubt has an influential SB father in law that fills the hole left by his own absent father and relatively disengaged step father (my father), so I can understand why he's such an idiot, but still I cannot respect him for it.
I recently went through my aunt's place after she passed away. It's a truly overwhelming task. I can't imagine how much more difficult it's made by the grief of the departed one being your parent. My heart goes out to you.
And not be insensitive, but...
Remember the little cloth rings that strengthen punched holes in paper so they don't tear out of binders so easily? I threw away boxes of those
These are called reinforcements, and I have been looking EVERYWHERE for them. Nobody sells them anymore. You probably could've sold them on eBay for a bundle.
My late and ex husband hoarded -- in my house, until I lowered the boom -- and when he died I was the only one who cared a damn enough to empty out the storage unit he funded with his exiguous Social Security check (it wasn't enough to pay for shelter for him, though he might have been eligible for help with that had he not been pathologically opposed to anything involving "hassle").
So I feel a ton of reverb when I read about your sorting and mining. Especially the tape cassettes. I actually found someone whose second vehicle was an old Suburban with a tape player, who wanted boxes full of opera and symphony recordings that I would have loathed to incinerate.
At one point, a client of mine looked around the living room at the desiderata I had fetched from the storage unit and said "My God, this is a life."
We write our stories one way or another.
@Don: "What are my kids going to think of me? I don't spend enough time with them either. None of us ever do, though, do we?
My son with whom I spent too little time is a much better father than I ever was. I can't take much credit but it pleases me greatly that that's the way it turned out.
It was easier for me when my dad died. I come from an old Quaker family who never threw anything away so our memories and some furniture literally goes back to 1642. We had winnowed down the Pennsylvania house and its vast attic when they moved to Florida in the 80s. Had a sale. And I took the rest north to use and to stack in my attic. Later, my folks realized that northern finishes don't do in a southern clime and I got the last few of the favorite furniture.
I got the house here when my dad died, so most of my effort was spent moving the paperwork and some things I wanted up north to be replaced by stuff I didn't need or had to have down here. I kept the tapes of Cirque du Soleil and the operas, and the casettes down here. The vinyl went north. I already had the entire collection of Kodachrome and Ektachrome and Plus-X slides in a walnut chest up north.
It will not be easier for my own kids.
Post a Comment