As You Like It: Far from Home

Pack, ship, give away. Forty years dwindled down to four words. This summer Mom and I went from room to room, closet to closet, drawer to drawer repeating that mantra, answering three seemingly simple questions that embraced our hardest choices. How do you decide which one of your 40 years to pack, ship, or give away? And sometimes, throw away. Every day I stood next to a closet or a drawer, looking questioningly at Mom as she whittled away 40 years of her life. People who have never done it before use our decade’s most thoughtless word — downsizing. A better word would be heartbreaking.

Since my dad died ten years ago my mom had been living in Israel alone. I accepted her decision even though I wanted her near me. I had long ago grown tired of seeing her only once a year and worrying long distance the rest of the time. But she couldn’t leave her home, the place that her father had dreamed of so many years ago. “I’m not ready yet,” she kept telling me. And I respected what she wanted even though I didn’t like it.

But then last year there was an opening in a senior housing complex nearby that had a caring staff and residents who formed a close community. There were support services and programs that Mom would enjoy. I called Mom to tell her that I had found a wonderful place for her to live and to my amazement she confessed that she was finally ready to move. I was ecstatic. All I could think of was that I would finally have a full-time mom. I could pick up the phone and call her whenever I wanted and not figure out the seven-hour time difference. And even better, I could see her once a week instead of once a year.

And so that’s how I found myself in Israel in July sorting out 40 years of my mother’s life. I had known that it was going to be difficult but I hadn’t been prepared for how difficult.

Mom had already sold her apartment and most of her furniture — so how much more could there be to do? Looking back on it now I can’t believe that I had been so unprepared. But in my defense it wasn’t only me. Mom’s friends would constantly ask us why we were so tired. What was left to do? Besides the dissolution of the apartment, there were lists of bureaucracies to deal with since my mom was leaving the country — everything from city hall to the cable company. We spent days in offices and on the phone. It took us three days to just cancel phone service and we never fully resolved the cable company. I finally had to threaten to throw the cable box out the window before they agreed to send someone over to pick it up.

But despite the endless office visits and phone calls it was the house that was the most difficult. Though we would be shipping whatever Mom wanted to take with her, we were limited by the cost and the amount of room in her new place. I advised her to take whatever could not be replaced — photos, letters, artwork. But Mom is a meticulous memory keeper and she had stored our lives so very carefully in plastic and tissue paper for so many years. Each decision became agony, life stories tossed painfully away. We remembered everyone who had created or touched something. I discovered that she had lovingly saved in albums all the years of letters I had written her. When I began reading them I realized that they formed our family’s history. I sat on the floor remembering the girls as babies, my dad, our lives for so many years. How could we toss it away?

Pack, ship, give away. In the end we did it. Slowly, tearfully, trying not to think about what we were doing. We tried to look ahead to the good things that were waiting for us and not back to what we had lost. Over and over again we repeated the old cliché that it wasn’t things that were important but people — but the words were hollow. We could feel the lives that had passed so quickly in all the things that we handled as we tried to hold onto the memories. Don’t believe the people who insist that material things are never important. When you live in a place long enough the place and its people become one — people’s voices, their music, their faces become ingrained in all the things that they’ve touched and lived with.

As I walk through the rooms I see the bed where Steve and I slept for so many summers, the room that held our daughters’ laughter and fights, the step that Lisa worked so hard to climb when she was learning to walk, the room where she played soccer when she was just a year and half, the terrace where Mariel put together endless puzzles, my father’s favorite rocking chair where he sat and looked out at the city. I can see and hear and feel it all — and how do you ship that? People who insist that a home is never the house but the people have never lost it all.

And losing those things takes you so far from home.

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Posted by Joan Florek Schottenfeld on Sep 9 2010. Filed under As You Like It, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.