This is my mother’s last night in the house she and my father built more than forty years ago, and she doesn’t know. There are empty spaces where furniture and objects used to be. The living room sofa is gone. Her sit-to-stand chair. The oval kitchen table that was always too small but my mother, me, and my sons crowded around it anyway for meals after my father died. The ceramic duck with the kerchief that I never liked that flanked the family room fireplace sits on a window ledge in her new apartment beside her pink and purple African violets. I wander the hallways looking for art we could use to decorate the apartment—the botanical drawings, the quilt given to her by children from the Boys and Girls Club in thanks for the “Nana Project” that she sponsored.
I sit on a floral couch in the family room where I used to nap while my toddler sons napped in upstairs bedrooms on visits to Nana and Grampy’s from our home thirty miles north in San Francisco. A few years later the couch became the perfect vantage to see into the yard where my preschool-aged sons romped in a plastic pool on the grass or hurled themselves at each other in yellow and red bumper cars or chased the dog. Where was she during these hijinks? In the kitchen reading the paper and snacking? Her closet? —a space capacious enough to hold every T-shirt, dress, or jacket that she ever owned and never wore for years, refusing to allow me to give them away though I begged, many times. Was she afraid she might need the T-shirt or dress someday? Or that one of her daughters might see the perfect something and want it? Or that giving it away would be a mistake she’d regret? It’s only now that she’s in her nineties, a widow with dementia who no longer knows what’s what, that I can throw away papers and she doesn’t see, tiptoe past the kitchen carrying an armload of plates to disperse while she sits in a wheelchair at the table—a vacant presence— and doesn’t look up from giraffes striding across the plains on a nature show or video clips of Audrey Hepburn singing “I Could Have Danced All Night” in My Fair Lady. I steel myself to do what I have to do.
In a stack on the coffee table I find a notebook with some of the occasional poems she liked to write: “How did I get to be so/Old?/ Day by day life turns the/Page/ And here I am at this extraordinary age.” How did she get so old? How did I get so old? I started this clean-up two years ago, my sister and I realizing that if we moved her now, she wouldn’t know. The goal is to sell the house— dusty, depressing, too-big—and move her with her caregivers to an apartment.
She never wanted to leave this home—the culmination of her dreams— fueled, perhaps, by her mother’s disappointment in her own husband’s lack of business success. In a photo from my mother’s college years, she’s one of several girls grouped admiringly around a sorority sister’s outstretched hand sporting a sparkly diamond engagement ring. The story my mother tells is that when she got engaged to my father, one of those girls said a southern drawl, “That boy, he’s going to take care of you.” And he did, in a way my mother’s father never took care of his wife.
During college, I used to wander the library stacks, in the years before book wandering went online. I came across Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, written in 1963, about ten years before I found it. I remember staying in the stacks for hours amidst the dusty books and mostly windowless warrens to read. “The Problem That Has No Name,” Friedan titled her first chapter, describing the college-educated (ostensibly white) woman who “shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material,” but late at night, lying in bed next to her husband, feared asking herself, “Is this all?” Books and magazines extolled the greatest virtue for a woman was “to glory in their own femininity” and “the suburban housewife…was the dream image of the young American woman…” Friedan, of course, was writing about the emptiness of that dream, and that women can no longer ignore the voice inside that whispers they want more than family, husband, home.
My mother seemed to have little interest in Friedan’s message. She never mentioned The Feminine Mystique to me, though around the time I discovered Friedan my mother told me that Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift From the Sea was essential reading for all women. Lindbergh wrote that time alone centered the woman whose life revolved around caring for others, a message my mother most likely found lifesaving. If my mother wanted to be her own nucleus of power, ambition, and worldly accomplishment, she never let on.
I follow a trail through the house that leads to every trip my mother took to New York after which boxes of exquisite porcelains would arrive at her door, every party attended with my father to which she wore a stunning dress that she stowed permanently in her closet, every card received and saved so she could update her address book and then never discard, every morning work-out in sweats she still owns, lifting weights unused for twenty years now stacked in a corner, workout shoes piled on the floor next to daytime shoes next to evening shoes, all of which no longer fit, every meeting attended with the agenda saved inside its manilla folder, every note she made to herself about the next day’s errands and calls—creating an unholy mess she was powerless to confront. I could judge her endless consumption. I could be angry at her seeming lack of concern about the impact of this legacy of artifacts on my sister and me. Sometimes I do judge. Sometimes I am angry. Sometimes I’m just sad. What I want is to understand. What did she think as she went about her days? What did she want her life to mean?
Before bed my mother and I watch Grace and Frankie, our usual show about two aging friends whose husbands leave them for each other. When I enter, she calls out: “Susan!” in a sharp tone, sounding like her old self. I haven’t heard this tone in months, maybe years. These days she’s more apt to say, “Help me,” at times in a bid for attention, but often because she needs help—lifting fork to mouth, buttoning her blouse, getting out of bed. She clutches a big brown bunny with floppy ears that my sister bought. I stroke her cheeks with the soft ears and she relaxes.
Tomorrow the crew arrives at 9:30 to transport to the apartment plates, cookware, my mother’s hospital bed. Some of the furniture has already gone. Everything will be in place when the medical transport comes to get her at 3:30. The doctor prescribes an extra sedative, one more on arrival if she’s agitated after the move.
I’m taking a class on ‘journaling into memoir’ over the final weeks we’re getting the house ready to sell. If I write everything down, maybe I’ll remember the blur of days. I list titles in my journal as books are moved from shelves and put into boxes. I note the variety of shirts in my father’s closet, copy the descriptors that he applied to each shelf so he could identify shirts by color, season, sleeve, type. He did love clothes. He did love to be organized. He was proud his hard work made his wardrobe possible. I snap pictures of the chaos of my mother’s spaces: her porcelain collection filling closets, the pantry, attics, counter tops. I snap more photos of the uncategorizable papers and magazines and notes that engulf her office, her dressing area, the bathroom, the kitchen.
I scoot up and down the hallways, proud of my organizational abilities. I eat lunch with my team –salads and sandwiches and peanut butter, chocolate chip, and oatmeal cookies. I sort china. My mother had a wonderful aesthetic sensibility and ability to see beauty I think, recognizing her strengths. A few hours later, the piles loom. Did my mother think she would live forever? Did she want us to have everything she’d always wanted? We make bundles for donation and designate items for auction house sales. This is the hat with the black flower at the base that my mother wore on vacations to the beach. This is the flowered couch my sons used to build a fort. This is the hand-hammered silver tray my mother treasured as an example of the craftsman’s art. I sort linens like playing cards. Pale yellow mats with a tulip in the lower right corner, oval-shapes with sheer, scalloped edging. I smooth an errant linen. My mother was incapable of doing what I’m doing. She had difficulty making decisions, she had a profound attachment to things, an overwhelming need for perfection. These objects are her legacy. What, besides things, was she passing on? I fold a linen napkin embroidered with small pink flowers and green leaves—lovely—andfind the rest of the set. Take them home? Give away?
I resolve to give away my things and sell my house before my sons have to do it for me. Or maybe I’ll do it with them. “Death cleaning,” it’s called.
She never called herself a collector, though that’s one part of what she was. She preferred other descriptors—New England girl, wife, philanthropist, and mother. As I got older, I wanted her to claim the title collector—this is what you know! I thought. This is how you spend your time. Be proud!
During college, when I was stomping through the Connecticut snow wearing workman’s boots from Bob’s Surplus, my mother was in New York visiting antique stores, meeting other collectors, sharing notes on auctions, shows. On vacations I’d come home to plates, bowls, and covered dishes set primly on tabletops and counters, fresh from one of her New York excursions. Her shelves filled, new plates often sat for months before she stored them away.
Cleaning out her house I found in the attic dozens of unopened boxes of china, some of her very best things, the only plates, the auction house said, with any real value. Few now want the Chinese porcelain she loved, the Victorian silver coffee and tea set—or silver berry spoons!— if anyone even knows what they are. I know. Why do I know about these useless things? Because my mother thought it important.
She was a master of entertaining. “Use place cards at the table,” she’d admonish. Guests need to know where to sit. Arrange fresh flowers for a centerpiece, she’d counsel, but not too high an arrangement, so conversation between guests seated across from one another can easily flow. Place rubber rounds under linens to prevent slipping. I imagine my mother before a dinner with a ruler, almost grim, eyes firmly on her task, measuring between mats for exact placement. As a young married woman, I followed her rules like a dog.
She was somewhere in her seventies and eighties when I realized that collecting and hoarding could be hard to distinguish. I wonder if the clutter in her house reflected a clutter in her brain. “I’m cleaning out the house inch by inch,” my mother would say when my sister and I expressed alarm, as if to reassure us that she knew what she was doing and had her household situation under control. She didn’t, of course. I’m trying to face her compulsion. I’m trying not to let it overwhelm the full picture of her.
An old mirror I unearthed in a back closet at the house now hangs in the front hall of my mother’s new apartment. Wavy lines divide my face into undulating planes, obscuring a clear view of who I know myself to be. The wall of chicken and rooster paintings from the kitchen is next to the oval table. Her favorite straw sun hat sits on a hook—the purple rimmed sunglasses she always wears on the front room table.The new apartment looks cozy and familiar. The move went without a hitch. She’s not agitated. She eats dinner, as usual. Does she know she’s somewhere different? I go back to the house after she settles for the night. It’s dark, quiet, piles of plates, linens, clothing everywhere. I miss her presence. I wander through rooms, opening cabinet doors still crammed, art yet on the walls—so much more to sort, sell, or donate before we hand the house to the broker.
I poke around her bedroom, mostly empty but for the lavender chaise in the corner, scheduled for shipment to my sister. I pull open heavy drawers of the bedside bureau and find a photo of my father at seventeen, newly commissioned in the navy. He wears a sailor’s cap emblazoned with “US Navy” and a sailor’s dark V-neck top over a white T-shirt. Traces of faded yellow from tape mark each corner of the picture. My father was an optimistic but discerning man—except, perhaps, when he idealized the people he loved, especially his wife. I add his photo to the mountain I plan to sort and digitize. In the middle drawer I find a leather notebook with blank pages and a plain notebook titled, “I Remember the Lilacs.” It’s dated a year after my father died, almost fifteen years ago. My mother repeated this phrase like a mantra a few years back. I open the notebook and read, “I remember the room at the end of the hall on the right. The window on the wall opposite the door was high and looked out to the ocean, although the ocean was about a block away. The walls were azure blue with white wood trim. I was in my room, and I was a very young child.”
This is her quiet, interior voice, a voice she seldom revealed. I feel calmed by the memory of her voice, the way I felt when she smoothed the blankets under my chin and said good night to me when I was a girl. Did the remembrance she wrote ground her, remind her of where she’d come from before making what she called the “gut” choices “that shaped my life?” She wrote of treasuring solitude, softly singing with her grandfather on rocking chairs on a screened porch, her love for the white sand beach of the Atlantic Ocean. The journal ends after just a half-dozen pages. I want to keep hearing this quiet voice. I take photos of the pages and put the notebook in a pile to show my sister.
For my journaling class I’m reading The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits. I get into the bathtub one afternoon and read. Sun casts tiny rainbows on the white walls, the tub’s stainless steel faucet glistens. Soon I’m laughing out loud. I love this book, it’s just what I need. Spontaneous, funny, no pretensions—the book is an antidote to the drudgery of emptying my mother’s house. Julavits finds a tap handle between the studs in her dining room wall when the wall is demolished. She imagines the original owner must have buried it, not wanting to throw it away. What should she, Julavits, do with her discovery? Finally, she decides to draw a picture of the tap handle.
“What does it mean to own this wooden table, this pottery bowl, this random ancestor painting?” Julavits asks, questions I ask myself as I look around my home. What does ownership of things mean to me and what did it mean to my mother? Testaments of success? Proof of a good eye? Treasures to pass on? Beauty to enjoy? Maybe all of this. Julavits doesn’t understand her inability to own things in a gratifying way. Objects drift from table to shelf—“death row limbo” she calls it. My eyes droop and head nods and the book’s pages dip into the bathtub. I leave it open on the bathroom counter to dry, but its pages will be forever bloated as a record of this time.
I know little of my mother’s collecting forays. She never told my sister or me anything about them, though they clearly occupied her days. Did she withhold because as teen-agers, we teased her that all she did was shop? Did she fear that what she was doing was unimportant? I want to understand her motivations. I read Inside the Head of a Collector, by Shirley Mueller. Mueller started her career as a neurologist and moved into financial advising. Using her knowledge of the brain and her understanding of how people make financial decisions, she attempts to address what inspires the collector. Mostly, she comes down on the side of pleasure. “It [collecting] makes us happy,” she says. She debunks the ideas of professor of psychiatry and psychoanalyst Werner Muensterberger, author of Collecting: An Unruly Passion, published twenty-five years earlier, who theorizes that one’s possessions represent the self, and that their internal function for collectors “is to screen off self-doubt and unassimilated memories.” This is interesting to me. Perhaps my mother collected because of neuroses, her relationship with her self, with her mother. I read an article titled, “Hoarding versus collecting: where does pathology diverge from play?” Do I need an article to tell me what I already know? The proof is laid before me, like a taunt.
What I’d like is to have seen her in action. Did adrenalin kick in when she saw something she wanted? Was she stimulated intellectually? How did she feel when she saw something she loved? How did she choose? Was she impulsive? Intentional? Whom did she talk with? Where did she shop? What I want to know is her.
The household team in my mother’s closet sorts clothing for consignment and donation. They’re laying out china for auction houses on white plastic tables. For a minute—just one—I think about tipping a long table and watching the china fall and break—my mother’s beautiful export china that I love.
I have the strangest feeling that I want to call my dad and let him know we’re selling the house and dispersing the contents. I know he’d say it’s about time. He wanted this done before he died, though he didn’t push, knowing better than me, perhaps, his wife’s limitations. “You’re leaving your daughters a mess,” he’d tell my mother, but I didn’t need to hear it from him. I’d been anticipating the mess for years.
By evening, everyone goes home. I’ve can’t find my spare house keys, a credit card, my to-do list. I can’t find the school photo of me that my father kept stuck to his bathroom mirror for fifty-five plus years. I want this photo! It matters to me that my father saw it every day when he washed his face, brushed his teeth, shaved. I find my bronzed baby shoes in my mother’s closet and pack them carefully to put with my sons’ bronzed baby shoes at home. I put my sister’s shoes in a pile to send to her. Does anyone bronze baby shoes anymore? I fall into bed, but I can’t sleep. I drift through the house like a ghost.
The next day I find the photo, tucked into The Folded Clock. The image is clear, creased—my bangs straight and long past my brows, my flowered blouse with its round collar, a half-smile. I put it safely in my wallet with those of my sons at the same age.
I find the Stanford Hospital notes from the last days of my father’s life. I find his Navy discharge papers. What do I do with those? I put them in my purse to go in our safe at home.
I spend all day sorting photos: ancestors that we don’t know, grandparents on mother’s side, grandparents on my father’s side (There are few of these, my mother never liked my father’s parents), each parent when young, parents together, sister, me, my sons, sister’s daughter. There’s a high school photo of my mother’s father with a football at his feet, inscribed with “Champions PHS 1917.” He’s wearing a white V-neck sweater with the letter “P.” There’s a wedding photo of him a few years later with my mother’s mother. She wears a hat with a wide brim, a floral dress, and a double strand of pearls.
In my mother’s closet her hats are in a pile on the floor. In the library books are stacked in boxes. I pick up a needlepoint pillow stitched with yellow, brown, and turquoise shells and “’79 Trudy and Ray, with our love.” Brown lamps, Chinese lamps, brass lamps are grouped on my father’s old desk. The “Happy Birthday” poster colored in orange, yellow, blue swirls 1960s style that I made for my father’s fortieth leans against the wall with the other miscellany slated for the dump.
This is what it’s like to undo a life.
I have dinner with my mother. For the first time in months, she registers my presence, holds my hands, pulling them towards her in a kind of back-and-forth dance. I kiss her cheek, she kisses mine. Such a sad, long death. I miss her. She was a pain.
The representatives from the auction house are here and it’s strange to see my mother’s things laid out—no longer hers, or ours. The objects look forlorn grouped on tables—silver tableware should be gleaming at a guest’s place at one of my mother’s dinner parties, champagne flutes brimming, shimmering on trays, demitasse china cups filled with chilled soup, or a clear broth, my mother elegant and beaming as she welcomes guests, introduces them to one another, stopping to make a minute adjustment to an arrangement of peonies. When I say to one representative that my mother had a good eye, I get teary. She touches my arm. Such a sad way for it to end—but how else does it end? We get old, we get sick, we die—and that’s if we’re lucky.
I pack up my toiletries that I’ve stored at the house for the last few years: hair blower, flat iron, toothpaste, shampoo, make-up. I’m taking home my iPad, charger, headphones.
I help my son and his fiancé pick out furniture, plates, glasses, linens. I love that some of my mother’s things will go with them, and with my other sons. She’d love it too.
Their choices are stored in the garage, another son’s things are going to storage, the third son’s boxes already shipped. My sister’s stuff is en route, mine go at the end of the week.
There are boxes lining the hallways, more than sixty for consignment. I can’t count the number of boxes holding my mother’s porcelain, going to auction. Once, we sat at her dining room table. She picked up a plate from her collection and slowly traced the outline of a girl, sitting under three weeping willows, by a river. “She’s peaceful,” my mother said, “her life’s serene.” She held the plate a moment longer, then carefully set it down.
I browse through the photo album that was made when my parents were building the house. In the first photo they’re standing in the doorway of their new front hall. My father wears a dark cardigan and khaki pants, he has his hands in his pockets, my mother’s in a plaid a-line skirt and a dark blue pussy-bow blouse. In an upper corner, barely visible, is a hanging light just sent to auction. They both smile, looking happy and shy. Twenty-five years before they’d moved to a rented house in Walnut Creek with a small yard and space for a washer and dryer, leaving their parents and the east coast.
Trucks from the auction house pull into the driveway.
I go to the apartment to see my mother. She’s wearing a green sweater. A yellow flowered napkin is tucked into her neckline. She looks hard at me—that’s it.
Ireceive photos of her clothes in a consignment store for sale. It’s strange and horrible to see her closet on retail clothing racks. Pink and blue quilted robes. A long skirt with black and gold zig-zags. A long-sleeved black and white wool dress. At home. Winter entertaining. A luncheon in San Francisco. I could cry, remembering.
There’s so much stuff that’s still in the office: files, knick-knacks, boxes, vases, my father’s audio tapes. I’m panicking. There’s not enough time. The house is on the broker’s tour in two days.
My sister and I spend ten minutes in the house together, before the broker comes with a client. This will be our last time here.
Clearing out her cabinets I found boxes of personalized stationery, enough to outlive her, and me. Who writes personal notes by hand these days when email and texts are so efficient? Me—for one.
I hear stories about her from people that I know. For instance, dressed in a good wool suit she knelt on the floor arranging seating for a fundraiser, moving the names of guests like chest pieces around circles drawn for tables on a giant sheet. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” my friend said, “that elegant lady—the co-chair!—on her hands and knees.” She pre-bought hostess gifts to always have a supply and brought them with a rose from her garden fastened to the ribbon—I found unmarked wrapped gifts stockpiled on her closet floor. I sniffed one and knew immediately—fragrant soaps for the powder room.
Planning my birthday lunch I use my mother’s pink plates and her linen napkins with embroidered pink flowers. I wish I didn’t love these beautiful things. I cherish that my mother once fell in love with them too.
A caregiver said that one day my mother told her, “I want to go home.”
“You are home,” she replied.
And she was; she was living in a light-filled, tidy home empty of the treasures that long gave meaning to her days. She’d be heartbroken if she knew.
I sit at her kitchen table sometimes as the day fades and the homes switch on their lights, twinkling in the hills and beyond. One day, we will have to clear this home too. We’ll disperse the plates, pack up the pictures, donate the clothes. For now, the plush bunny rests on the table, the pink and purple African violets gleam on the windowsill. The commuter train wails in the distance, its sound lingering even after it’s gone. I go into the bedroom and kiss my mother good night.
Susan Moldaw is a writer, chaplain, and singer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in Broad Street, Fourth Genre, Narrative, Sweet Lit, The Millions, and others. She sings with the Threshold Choir.
Photographing the harbor and hills of Camden, Maine, at the turn of the twentieth century, Theresa Babb (1868–1948) recorded both the intimacies of social life and her hometown’s industrial and seafaring traditions. What stands out most about Babb’s images is how they let us glimpse into a personal world of female friendship, captured in such a way that seems both timeless and strikingly modern. From Public Domain Review.
