Personal Note
While in Georgia
for almost three months, I wrote not one word. I read constantly between all
the chores of cleaning up after a life has ended. I’m starting up my blog again
and will post on Mondays.
A Parent’s Death
I’m a stress
eater. From August through October, I lost ten pounds. Continuous adrenaline
spikes will do that. They burden the digestive system and, gone on too long,
cloud the mind. My father’s foot lifted to the curb and missed. He fell into
the convenience store’s lot and avoided having his head crushed by inches. No
doubt scared a few years off the parking customer’s life. Took his in a few weeks. The broken hip would
have healed. He came through surgery confused but okay. The kidney disease
exacerbated by cancer was the actual cause of death.
Urgings to
prepare for the inevitable—the cancer had been treatable for the short-term,
incurable long-term—went unheeded. It is recommended that surviving spouses
refrain from making life-altering decisions for at least a year after a loved
one’s death. And maybe you can do that if you prepare ahead—have enough
insurance to cover debt, have all possessions in both spouses’ names, and
encourage each other to be as independent as possible. This in part means both
know how to handle bills and where the important policies, certificates, and
such have been stored.
I read twenty
novels in two-and-a-half months, mostly escapist reading, as necessary for
combatting stress as the hard exercise hauling out clutter from fifty-nine
years of marriage, over forty, thirty-gallon bags worth; setting up stuff my
mother never used for an estate sale in the garage, kitchen, living room, and
bedroom, spending hours pricing and tagging each item; hauling out and
unpacking boxes of unused stuff and packing must-keep items, which continually
revolved back and forth as my mom changed her mind about the saleable stuff.
An ironic
choice, the first book I read was Matthew Thomas’s We Are Not Ourselves, about a family dealing with Alzheimer’s.
Character-driven, it had no plot per se other than the course of the disease
but kept my scattered attention and emotions engaged. My mother suffers from
dementia and shouldn’t be alone. I convinced her to sell her house and come
live with me—sort of. Packing and sale preparations often stopped for days as
she again and again changed her mind, afraid to live alone, confused by even
basic chores such as calling in medication refills, but even more afraid of
giving up her house.
Next week—what a
house means to my mother.
