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Cleaning House by Anneke Haku On the morning after my father's death three years ago, my mother and I returned home from the hospital to find not only our lives in disarray, but our house too. My mother looked at me as we walked in the door and announced it was time to clean house.
The next travesty to occur was her complete redecoration of our old farmhouse. Anything that wasn't personally connected to her was in danger of being banished. Candles started sprouting up all over the house. Blues albums were replaced with Celtic music. Italian cookbooks and pizza stones were replaced with jars of dill pickles and pillars of tuna cans. The hardest for me though, was when pictures of my father started disappearing off of the walls. Pictures that were a comfort to me, were painful for her. Her walls had to represent the people she still had in her life. Realizing we were never going to agree on the proper way to mourn the person we had lost, I moved out of my parents' house and left my mom behind to build a new life as a widow at the age of 52. A few months later, it became more then cleaning out closets and taking down pictures. My mother sold the house. She moved into town, leaving behind the farmhouse she and my father owned and the enormous garden my father had planted. She says the move has made it more convenient for work and there is less grass to mow. I think she just had too much extra closet space to fill. And here I find myself with a new home where pictures of my dad litter the walls. There are old T-shirts that are never worn and blues albums never listened to. And if you catch me on a bad day I will fascinate you with stories about my dad's spaghetti sauce and apple pie. But the shrine has come down. Things are getting easier. For my mother too. Her new house looks like the perfect cottage she has always wanted. Painted Easter egg blue, with a back yard where the dog can run. Candles are still found around every corner, but I notice a few pictures of dad are back up too. As hard as the months were living together after dad died, I miss her everyday. But we now both realize that mourning in the same house with someone can be as difficult as mourning alone. It's such an awkward time. Sometimes, though, I miss living with her. Last time I visited, we drove by the old house. Dad's garden has succumbed to 6-foot weeds, but the land still offers a terrific view of the prairie. One of the things my dad loved about the place was that we could watch the storms roll in. Funny that mom and I never saw this one coming. |
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The
Choices We Make
Cleaning House
Dad's
clothes were the first to go. I was dumbfounded as she
sorted through his dresser as if it were filled with rags.
I, of course, thought his clothes should hang in the closet
for years to come -- a cotton T-shirt shrine not to be
touched until I had wrung every last memory out of it. I
spent hours digging through garbage bags full of clothing
being deported to Goodwill, frantically looking for a
Hawaiian print shirt I gave dad, as a joke, two years prior.
All the while my heartless mother stood in front of the
empty closet plotting what to do with all the extra space.
