Hope on the Shelf

On a shelf inside one of our spiffy new cabinets, sits my hope of a workable garage. It's still not quite the right organizational scheme. We just have TOO MUCH STUFF. Whenever I try to tackle the piles and clumps of our belongings that remain in the middle of the garage floor and out in the back yard under a blue tarp, I get overwhelmed by how complicated this project really is. Today, I'll take a few boxes down to St. Vincent de Paul to get these things out of the way. That's going to have to be enough. I do have other things to do, I think.

My Dad died about two weeks ago. It has been difficult. Because although his role in our family had changed years ago, it still is strange to think of my family without him and the attention that he required. In a perfect world, wouldn't we all be so well organized that even a death in the family would be manageable? After all, we would be adequately prepared for any number of challenges. We would have plans in place for dealing with most emergencies. His decline and death wasn't an unexpected shock. Over the last few years, my siblings and I talked about him all the time. Certainly, we thought we knew of better ways to manage my father's medical care than what he was receiving. We spent long hours discussing what we believed he needed and our frustration at not having the power to implement our ideas. Would our style of managing his life have made any real difference in his quality of life or our concern about it? When he died, would those discussions have prevented me from the unsettled feeling that the rug was pulled out from under me?

He was suffering from Parkinson's Disease for over ten years. It's a horrible, horrible affliction and was made worse by dementia that cruelly ate his disintegrating spirit, bite after bite. In many of the ways that count, he was absent from our day-to-day lives long ago. But Mom wasn't ready for his passing, even though she certainly knew he would never be well enough to be himself again. She stayed by his side until he let go of his last breath, offering him her comforting presence even though she couldn't be sure he even knew she was there. After spending sixty-five years of her life devoted to him, his causes, and his needs, she feels so disoriented, so sad. She's been spending her days trying to figure out how to move forward: giving away the well-made suits that he'll never wear to another important meeting, golf clubs that he never had a chance to swing, his shoes that he won't walk in again. She says that now there is room enough for her own shoes that were stacked up so awkwardly in the closet. I imagine that she wishes she didn't have the space to spread out and reorganize her things so efficiently. Maybe for her, being organized wouldn't be her first choice.