(Weekly series, every Monday)
It's been some five weeks now since I was in the room where my sister died. I've been in the house since that day, helping my niece with small tasks here and there, stopping by to check on her or pick up some item for another errand.
 | (Note from The Grieving Room host Dem in the Heart of Texas For those who have missed this over the last several Monday evenings, this is a weekly forum (with rotating hosts) for whoever happens by and wants to discuss issues relating to grief, death, loss, or impending loss. Share your story, or read and cry - use it for what it's worth to you. Giving it a Rec each week will help keep it where more people can see it and perhaps find some comfort. Thanks.) |
We mean to start on the major task of sorting belongings in the small brick Tudor house in Ballard, sometime in June. It will be a daunting task, the picking through of the detritus of the lives of two people who've spent some 38 years in the same house, people who never sorted through anything, threw away anything regardless of its value or lack of value.
Her house sits back in a residential neighborhood a few blocks away from Shilshole Bay, a marina on Puget Sound just north of Seattle. The smell of salt water in the air is there, if you breathe in slowly. Forget to breathe, and forget to orient yourself, and it's possible to ignore that you are so close to the water. The Ballard residential area is a dense and old one, characteristic for the cultural enclave pocket neighborhoods of Seattle. Old Scandinavians, old fishermen, old residents are now balanced out by newer and newly financially established immigrants and young professionals. The houses are a mix of WWII GI Bill housing and older, early 1900's Craftsmans, 1920's brick Tudors, and some newer, skinny-lot modern wooden townhouses built on lots too small for a real residential house.
The tide into Puget Sound, near Shilshole, is an ocean-based tide, the water travelling from the Straits of Juan de Fuca and on down south through the shipping lanes between islands in the Sound and the peninsulas and isthmus-shaped appendages of Kitsap county. The far south end of the Sound, farther south than Seattle and down to Olympia, the state capitol, becomes the flush of the water current and many things accumulate at the south end, too far for any tide to wash back out to the Straits or the Pacific Ocean. Too many years have passed with polution from ships, from untreated sewage, from chemicals used up and down the agricultural belt that surrounds the land of the Sound. Sometimes things just go too far south.
In my sister's house, there are rooms of clothes and books and papers that no one has gone through in years. And the unfinished business of two souls still lingers in the house. But, of course, this is my imagination and my telling. Others might not see the debris I see.
I see the accumulation of an unordered life. Accumulation seems too clean a word, too defined a state for what that jumble of boxes, those piles of papers, the closets filled with musty, somewhat dusty clothes, the basement of tools long unused and uncared for. All elements of two lives merely lived day to day, an inertia of days into weeks into months into years. The final days ended by cancer. No time for closure, no time for making peace, no time for cleaning up. No time to let the tide wash things away.
I went into the bedroom last Saturday. I stupidly thought, or maybe I wasn't thinking at all, as I turned the carved glass doorknob of the mahogany bedroom door to my sister's bedroom. My 37 year old niece has been living there since Sharon died on April 26, partly as a convenience in settling the estate, partly because she is now the sole care provider for her brother Todd, who is developmentally disabled with Down Syndrome at age 35, and is on a waiting list for a residential care home for his long term care.
The house holds far more memories for my niece, of course. I do admire the way she's moved through this process and taken on the very adult task of sending in paperwork to Social Security, filing insurance claims, handling attorney matters in regards to transfer of guardianship, handling estate and will issues, is looking wisely at how to deal with a multiply-mortgaged house that is critically in need of repair. She's lost both parents to rapidly marauding cancers in the last five years – her father, my brother-in-law, to advanced kidney cancer in 2002, and her mother, now, to final stage esophageal cancer. I've diaried these family members before, in several ways, and my hope is that I don't belabor the subjects to the point of tedium for you, the reader.
I admire the fact that she's turned the bedroom into an office. "I can't sleep there, you know." Of course not. And so, for now, her queen-size bed is stationed, still, in the living room, next to the renovated Victorian sofa and wingback chair, in front of the picture window. The living room and dining room resemble the establishment of a temporary residential camping expedition, the rooms inhabited by temporary measures. There is so much stuff in all rooms of the house – my niece and her fiancé's belonging in some corners; other corners piled with the furniture and material possessions of my sister and the end result of her inability to clear out the wasteland of her own life after the death of her husband. These are bits of baggage both real and emotional, strewn over a landscape of grief.
I couldn't live there, and find that I can hardly set foot in the place. I have known this house since I was eleven; my sister was twenty years older than I. But the house holds ghosts, and memories, both bad and good. Scents and odors – the Jean Patou Joy perfume that was the expensive, scouting party signature smell of my sister as she entered a room. It permeates the bathroom and bedroom. The walls – walls once oyster-shell white stucco twenty years ago or more, now drip with an oily nicotinic sepia-stained patina. It will be a monumental job cleaning those walls when we begin to paint for the house sale. Trisodium phosphate, the trinity of cleaning. Cigarette-perfume-medicinal smell still lurks in the hallway outside the bedroom, much as I lurked there on Saturday.
Notice how difficult it is for me to move forward with this telling? I did open the door and I did go in. I had no real consciousness at first that I was nauseated, with – what? Grief? Flashback? Anxiety? What made me feel sick? In past situations – and there have been many, many situations in my life – I've never had this wave-like rumbling-in-the-gut reaction to returning to the scene of drama. For death is drama, quiet or loud. As an example, I've never had a fear of going out on water after the death of my father by drowning. Nor have I had much difficulty with walking into or through other rooms where loved ones have died and I've been there. I don't even get sick on twisting country roads in a madly driven car.
But this time was different. My nausea pushed me out of the room and back into the jungle of furniture that is now chaos inherited by my niece. I'm not so certain I can return to that room again. Did I form the picture of the slightly raised hospital bed with the still, quiet, sleeping face of my sister in my mind? Not consciously, though perhaps it washed into the inward-turned eyes of my mind, there unbidden, and I was seeing, but not seeing. Did I see the awkward actions of the funeral home folks as they maneuvered the body of my sister out the door, requesting my help as they struggled? I helped – I'm a strong woman. I don't think this had any play in my reaction. Did I see the hole that was once filled by a person I loved, but sometimes hated and sometimes only tolerated as she sometimes only tolerated me? I'm not sure.
I've let these weeks go by and I've let people say to me "you're handling this so well." I will tell you this. Pshaw. There is no "good" way to handle the tide of grief and loss – and sometimes you don't recognize it as it washes over you. Grief ebbs out with the current, but you turn your back and there are waves that will wash in. I think there is no high ground, no safe refuge, no future time safe from grief, no matter how you insulate and think you've got the tide figured out. There are certain high tides that wash over the breaktide of any shore.
Diaries you may have missed this week:
Steve Gilliard has died
Low red moon
The politics of death
station wagon bids us farewell
A Cat Tale: Preparing To Say Goodbye
Links to previous weeks series diaries:
May 28, 2007 – The Grieving Room – Memorial Day
May 21, 2007 - The Grieving Room - when does one heal?
May 14, 2007 - The Grieving Room - a Monday night series
May 7, 2007 - The Grieving Room - a Monday night series
Apr 30, 2007 – The Grieving Room - a Monday night series
Apr 23, 2007 - The Grieving Room – Paso Doble
Apr 16, 2007 - The Grieving Room - a weekly support diary
Thank you for reading The Grieving Room this evening. If anyone would like to volunteer for a future Monday, please drop a line to smnytx@yahoo.com.
