Closing It Out

I went up to New York on Tuesday and spent all day Wednesday, 'til about midnight, packing the apartment.

I think I'm done.

Thursday morning I hired a closeout specialist - a woman referred to me by M who shuts down seniors' apartments.  She brings in dealers to bid on furniture, hires junkers and movers, inspects and tracks down documents and other things you might have left behind, pays off building staff to handle the massive amounts of debris, negotiates with landlords if you need more time, turns off utilities, hands in cable boxes...

She used to be a care manager, but found that it was more profitable to deal with the aftermath.

What a remarkable society this is, where someone can build a business in the cracks that people fall through.  I don't mean that ironically - well, partly, because in a really just world, these things would be handled by institutions, not the underground.  Nevertheless, I'm genuinely grateful.  I was prepared to do it all myself but wasn't at all sure I'd be able to bring it off.  Now, as it stands, I'm not sure what's left for me to handle.  I'd originally planned to travel up there the next three weeks running, but if she can deliver, then what am I going to do when I get there?  Everything I want to remove is already boxed, and if the dealers and junkers are going to gut the place before Thanksgiving, which is the plan, then I'd just be sitting around there, staring at boxes and walls.

If it's finished, I'll be thrilled.  It's amazing how quickly you lose your connections.  At a certain point you've packed enough that the apartment isn't your childhood home anymore, it's just a decrepit warehouse filled with boxes.  As I mentioned, I could feel this beginning to happen last week, and this week, without my noticing, it went over the edge and all I wanted to do was be out of there for good.  No sentiment - well, the occasional wallop of emotion, but not nearly as strong or frequent as it used to be - and then not even that.  The sense that life has gone on ahead and I need to catch up with it.

It didn't occur to me 'til afterward that there was something faintly ironic in the fact that I spent much of the day loading the past into cartons while watching a Ghost Hunters marathon on SyFy.  If you tried to put that in a novel, an editor would probably say it was too obvious, and take it out.  But there it was and there I was, mostly oblivious to whatever it might have meant, 'til later, when I did my mild double-take.

After I finished with Closeout Person, I loaded some more of my father's clothes into the car and drove up to Woodlawn to visit my mother.  It's been a couple of years since I've been there and I'm not sure when I'll be back - maybe when I deliver my father there, maybe before, hard to say.  My mother was irritated - wanted to know why I was wasting my time with dead people and suggested I really ought to get on the road down to DC before the heavy rain hit.  But I think she was also happy about the attention.  At least it seemed that way.

Today was a recovery day, punctuated by bookkeeping.  The costs for November are going to be staggering, even by my current standards - rent for the New York apartment, the payout to E, movers and moving supplies, plus the nursing home and at least two weeks' worth of private-duty aides.  So I needed to line up more of his assets to sell before his checking goes through the overdraft floor and people get pissed.

Now I need to get after the nursing home crew and see when they're willing to open up visiting.  Based on conversations this week, it seems like they're waiting for him to relax more and get less verbal.  I need to tell them that that's not going to happen.  At some future point he's going to be dead and he'll still be talking - taking over Ouija boards or rattling the glassware or leaving voiceprints on answering machines or whatever it is they do.  So the staff needs to understand that he's as normal as he's going to be, and open the gates.

I have mixed feelings about a first visit - I've been enjoying the break.

But it's probably time for me to get on to the next phase now.

Comments

[Shu]

I'm relating to your moving, packing, closing out comments since we are boxing up, giving away, selling, arguing over what is kept and what is released back into the universe. I've now packed, unpacked, repacked the library of my father's books (those he wrote, those he collected / used for reference) 9 times in the last 7 years. I realize I love them more each time as they are my most tangible connection remaining to an extremely remarkable person, and I have to discipline myself not to settle back on the floor, where I'm huddled to do the boxing up, to open each book again to read and be taken away in time to when I could look up and see him sitting at his desk, a book held a few inches from his nose and taking notes in longhand with his black pen on a yellow legal pad for either a talk he's giving or another book.

Yet these feel more "mine" now than before as I accept the responsibility of ownership. Before, even though these were given to me, I still acquiesced to my mother's primacy with anything related to Pop.

Now I have her things, too, that are "mine" but still [as if] warm from her recent touch. But I know she won't decide to come back for them as she is most happy to finally be hand in hand with Pop again.

The visiting, when it starts, will feel quite different from before, as will the relationship. You may feel a bit displaced in the pecking order, but you will get used to it and find the right space that makes you as comfortable (as possible) as the Son rather than the fellow who has to keep all the balls up in the air.

It's okay. I hope you feel so much relief as you can finally be the Son. My daughter was so happy to become again the Granddaughter after 6-1/2 years as primary caregiver, too often put in the position of doing things, dealing with things, accepting the biting, hitting, yelling, temper huffs, that came with caregiving that the Granddaughter wouldn't even have known about.

Bless you all :-)
Encouragingly,
Shu