Jack of Harts

My mom died a year ago, and I have been clearing her house ever since. And for the last three weekends, I have had help doing more in depth clearing. The first two, I had help in my bedroom, with the biggest job being to empty the waterbed. That is a two-person job let me tell you. This last Saturday, FOUR friends came over and helped finish clearing my mom’s bedroom. I’ve been slowly clearing it for a year, donating the better part of twenty boxes of books and a similar number of shoes. I have cleared two thirds of the room in all. But that still left the last third, and the closet, and I could not go any further on my own. Emotionally, I just couldn’t do it alone.

So four friends came over. Two went through the stuff and sorted it all into trash, donate, and keep bags and boxes and shelves. And me and the other two carried the trash and donate stuff out to the two big SUVs that came with them. I did not have the objectivity to sort the stuff, so I left it to the other two friends and spent most of the time outside her bedroom. That worked well, and over the course of three or four hours of work we mostly emptied her room. Two SUVs full of trash went to the dump, and one SUV of donate went to a local place that takes donations. Lots and lots of purses. Mom loved her purses almost as much as she loved her shoes and books.

I was looking through the remains on Sunday. All the keep stuff was mainly photo albums and other obvious family mementos. And there was the crochet afghan my grandmother made for my parents when they were married. That is a major keepsake family heirloom right there. Then I remembered the OTHER crochet afghan she made back then. My baby blue baby blanket. It was not there. I could not see it anywhere in her room.

Total panic attack. I couldn’t even imagine having lost that. No. Correction. I COULD imagine it, and it made me sick. I looked all over and couldn’t find it. I finally gave up and went to bed. I couldn’t sleep. When it was time to get up and go to work, I couldn’t eat. All I could do was sit in my chair and look around my mom’s living room and wonder how in the world I was going to be able to deal with having lost the baby blanket my grandmother made for me with her own two hands. Had my hands been within inches of it? On the other side of the plastic bag? Had someone else taken it out? Or was it somewhere else in the house and I just hadn’t found it yet? I looked at the crochet poncho my mom kept on her chair until she died, and that I had arranged many months ago to make the chair look nice. And to cover and protect the crochet baby blue baby blanket underneath it.

I hadn’t lost it. I sat in my chair and cried. The relieved kind. And yet still scared kind, because I could have lost it. If I hadn’t put in a safe place so long ago. And the relieved kind because I hadn’t. And so I ended up finally going to work on maybe a couple hours of sleep and no food, and a total emotional wreck. Where I proceeded to buy an emotional support Dr Pepper and some Doritos. Because those are my comfort foods when all else fails. It was a rough day at work. So very, very rough. I came home from work, sat down in my chair, looked at the blanket, and fell asleep for several hours straight.

It is amazing how emotionally draining clearing out the house of a loved one can be, especially when you can’t find family artifacts that mean that much.