My mother passed away a couple of weeks ago. Just a week after my father-in-law so we had dueling funerals. She was eighty-four and still driving to her bingo games in Wisconsin up until August when she had some mini-strokes. It was then she decided she would give up the house she hadn’t lived in for over ten years. That’s why I had come back to Chicago. That and to help her find assisted living arrangements, but she slid away too fast for that. On Wednesday, we took her too the interview, but she couldn’t even cut her own tomatoes at lunch. So, on Thursday we started looking for a nursing home. On Friday, the doctor told us to hold that thought and late Saturday her spirit moved on.
What she left behind was a house inhabited by raccoons - by way of a hole in the roof, feral cats – by way of a broken basement window, and a skunk or two in the crawl-space under the master bedroom. She also left behind sixteen minivan trips to the church rummage sale, seven trips to Goodwill, a yard sale that covered the entire yard, sixty cubic yards of mostly recyclable dumpster trash, a refrigerator that hadn’t been on or opened in a decade and I never did make a dent in the basement or the attic in the garage.
There was twenty-five gallons of costume jewelry – or maybe some of it was real. It’s hard to tell. One woman, who bought a tin-full for a quarter at the yard sale, brought back a ring the next day saying, ‘If I kept this, it would be like stealing.’ I still have that ring.
Ten people, five days. It was a little like geological exploration – a seam of newpaper, a bag of clothes, a box of books and then a box that contained a box that had family pictures I hadn’t seen in thirty years.
“Do you have any more beads?” asked the man with the five-year old girl and the bucket of beads. “She loves beads.”
“I’m afraid most of them wound up in that dumpster,” I replied.
“I’ll take all the yarn you got,” said another woman – the wife of the building code inspector I had just talked to about the hole in the roof and a high-school acquaintance from long ago.
“I think that’s everything that didn’t smell like raccoon pee.” It was enlightening to see what people looked for and what they passed by.
A man bought ten of the forty or so jewelry boxes. “They were probably silver,” said my mother-in-law. “That was Al. He owned the junk store across the alley from my house until the city ran him out because it looked just like your mother’s house. But, he knows his silver.”
It was fortunate that the church was having a rummage sale. They had to open another wing just for the books. The Fellowship Hall wouldn’t be available for the reception, though.
“There’s nothing my mother would have like more than to have a combination funeral reception – rummage sale,” I told the pastor. We held the reception in the parlor upstairs, but people were free to mingle – and they did. I did. A lot of my mother’s life was in that church basement.
The refrigerator never made it out of the house. That disappointed the metal scavengers who hovered around the garage like vultures. Two engineers and seismic geologist couldn’t figure out how to get that thing out without taking the refrigerator doors off – and there was no one brave enough to do that.
In the late years of his life, my father would load some of that stuff up in his van and throw it in the church dumpster. It would find its way back in a day or two. It would bring friends. He eventually gave up. We all did.
The regular organist couldn’t play for the funeral, which was fine because her rendition of “I’m Gonna Love You Forever” left my wife and I laughing hysterically as we walked down the aisle on our wedding day. We found a violinist who could also bang on a piano. At my request, she played “Ashokan Farewell”. That always makes me cry. She’d never played it before, but some of her students had. She did fine.
Of the four hymns I selected for my mother and my wife selected for her father, three were the same. Amazing Grace always works. She had the congregation sing ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’. I sang it as a solo, a capella. The only time I made it all the way through without choking up was during the service. I forgot that most Methodists can’t sing ‘Be Still My Soul’. It worked fine for her in Minnesota, though – which is where they held her dads funeral.
She left as I was coming home, our planes passed each other somewhere over New Mexico.
