Finality

Yesterday a friend and I drove down to Mom’s and cleaned out her bedroom and bath. It was a bittersweet day: physically demanding and emotionally volatile, filled with memories. Obviously, it had to be done, and the whole house eventually will have to be cleaned out, but her bedroom and bath are so intensely personal. I was glad to have my friend with me; it would’ve been impossible without her because the memories were profound and the sadness overwhelming.

Many of her favorite garments were items I had bought for her when I had taken her shopping from time to time over the past five or six years. They were fun memories. Mom loved Belk and we would start there, looking for red dot clearance items.  One piece, an aqua colored top with sparkles around the neckline, made me take in my breath—she loved that top so much. It was flowy, filmy and on top of that, sparkly – all of her favorite things in one. She didn’t have many opportunities to wear it because she very rarely went anywhere over the last couple of years, but she did manage to enjoy that blouse a few times. When I removed from a drawer a pair of turquoise Capri pants that she wore often, I paused and held them to my face; memories of her rushed into my mind and for a moment, I could barely breathe. Suddenly I was holding the pants against my cheek and weeping into their softness.

This particular act, the cleaning out her bedroom, bathroom and closet, is an act of finality that beggars comparison. The most personal of items, taken from chests of drawers and bathroom cabinets, tossed into huge bags of black plastic, and given to others to use, or worse, thrown into the garbage bin, puts a period on the end of the sentence in a way even the interment service did not. Finality. She won’t need any of those things anymore.