I'm faced with downsizing in the very near future. The belongings I must trim were mostly those of my recently deceased wife Barbara, many of which she inherited from her parents. I no longer can afford, nor really want, to live in the home we shared. The rent's too high, the summer electric bills unbelievable. The place is too big for a lone widow, and it holds too many memories. Her children don't want these things.
So I will downsize, and I will cry while I do it. I will hold an estate sale. I never expected to live long enough to be the widow trying to sell her life's belongings so that she could move into a smaller place. I never expected to live alone.
It is so hard for me to do this. I have no particular attachment to the things themselves. Many of them never even made it into the house while she lived. She stored them, with the intention of moving them into our home after she got well. That never happened. I moved them in so that I could cut the cost of the storage facility from my budget. Things are tight everywhere, and it's no different here.
But even though I am not attached to these things, I know she was. And that makes it all the more difficult to contemplate letting go of them to total strangers. It feels as though I am betraying her somehow. It's as though as long as I hold on to the things that mattered to her, I don't have to admit she will never come home again.
I almost never look at the urn that holds her cremains. It's been almost nine months, and still it feels like it was just yesterday that I told the doctor in charge to "call it." They had been performing CPR on her for 35 minutes in the ICU before the nurse came to get me from my cot in the waiting room. I had been living in her hospital room for most of two years. Every time she went into an ICU, I was relegated to the waiting room, but I still slept as close by her as I could.
That morning, at 6:30 am, they came to get me. They told me she had gone into cardiac arrest 35 minutes before. The doctor on call told me they would continue CPR as long as I wanted, but she was pretty certain she would be brain dead even if they were able to restart her heart. It was her sixth bout of sepsis, and her second cardiac arrest. She was only down for six seconds the first time.
I knew in my own heart that, this time, she was already gone. I had seen signs even before they moved her to the ICU just days before. She had lost her fight, and she was losing awareness of where she was, and even who I was. I took about 30 seconds, and I told the doctor to "call it." I knew it was the hardest decision I would ever make.
Barbara was 48 years old. She died from complications of lupus. My Gods, how I miss her. So now I will make the second hardest decision I will ever make. I will schedule an estate sale.
Updated by wyldraven at Sun Mar 6, 2011, 02:18:32 PM
If I don't reply to every comment, it's because I can't see through the tears well enough to type. Thank you all for your kind words and suggestions. I will read them all, I promise.