{"id":1846,"date":"2017-05-11T22:40:43","date_gmt":"2017-05-11T22:40:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/?p=1846"},"modified":"2018-06-18T22:42:01","modified_gmt":"2018-06-18T22:42:01","slug":"letting-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/letting-go\/","title":{"rendered":"LETTING GO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hoarding is a big problem. It doesn\u2019t matter who you are, where you are from, how much money you have in the bank, or not. \u00a0Maybe saving stuff is like saving little slivers of ourselves. We know how this story of life is going to end. That we are marching, crawling, dancing, back-flipping toward the inevitable. Does squirreling the stuff away lull us into denial? Mute the truth? Massage our egos just enough to make it through one more day and still feel tethered to this earth by another delivery from Amazon?<\/p>\n

My mother passed away last July. My father died twenty years earlier and his stuff has been sitting dormant in their house all this time. The place needs to be cleared out, cleaned up and sold. I don\u2019t have brothers or sisters. My husband helps when he can but the job of looking at every little thing–of holding it in my hand, maybe pressing it against my heart and saying \u201cthank you\u201d or \u201cgood bye.” \u00a0Of taking its picture then depositing it in the rented dumpster in the garage\u2014a dumpster I will fill four times. This job is mine and mine alone. It feels like I’m riding\u00a0a time machine as I plow through boxes, piles of papers, endless file cabinets and big black Hefty Bags stuffed with God-knows-what.<\/em>\u00a0 Of memories hiding in the sooty, crusty corners that haven\u2019t seen the light of day since 1976.<\/p>\n

My parents had lives before they had me and now I\u2019m coming face-to-face with the old report cards and term reports and art projects. I\u2019m talking about theirs, not mine. In other words, my parents saved everything. \u00a0And that’s just IN the house. \u00a0There is an attic too. It takes two dump trucks from the most wonderful people at 1-800-Got-Junk?<\/a> to clear that out. Just the attic.<\/em> A friend stands sentry with me as the crew shoves bag after bag, box after box down the rickety wooden ladder into \u201ctoday.\u201d \u00a0If I had the time and the energy I would have emptied and searched through each bag, each box.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0But I am exhausted and overwhelmed and soon it all looks alike and smells alike and I just want it to be gone.<\/p>\n

One of the Junk guys tells me that his biggest job took thirty-two dump trucks. Thirty-two<\/em> trucks to haul the mess of \u201cwhatever\u201d away. Can you believe it? Our two loads are positively dainty compared to that\u2026<\/p>\n

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This is just the “entrance” to the attic…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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I’m so grateful for the help. And dazed by the whole spectacle.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After my father died my mother\u2019s mental illness spiraled out of control. Not that it was ever really \u201cin control\u201d but with him around–well kind of living his own life in his office, his hallowed space downstairs next to the garage–she wouldn\u2019t go too far<\/em> off the rails. But after he passed away the piles of stuff grew like bamboo in a rainforest. She got meaner and petty and petulant.<\/p>\n

The dishes lay filthy in the sink, clothes slung over chairs, then over boxes. She slept in a ratty daybed in front of the television in what was supposed to be the dining room, wearing a parka, the same parka from last night, from last week, from last month. My mother let me into the house long enough to drop groceries by the front door and would start screaming if I ventured beyond the relatively neat living room to the chaos-zone upstairs. She wouldn\u2019t let anyone else in either. But she liked to talk on the phone and was such a good actress that she convinced her buddies that things were peachy keen at the old homestead.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t have hot water,\u201d she confessed to me one day. \u201cLet me call a plumber,\u201d I implored. \u201cNO!\u201d She\u2019s screaming now into the phone. This went on and on. I tried to enlist others to help, but she would tell them, in her assertive\u00a0telephone voice \u201cthere\u2019s no problem.\u201d And they believed her and not me. She did not have hot water for a year.<\/em><\/p>\n

In retrospect, I should have called Social Services, but termites did a better job. Yes, Western Exterminators rocked her world. My mother had to vacate the place for three days or else die with the bugs. The guys were already inside, climbing over stuff, prepping the house, the tent was unfurling over the windows, it was getting dark inside and I still had to push that woman out the front door. To a local retirement home where they treated her like \u201cyour royal highness\u201d and got her to sign on the dotted line to move in.<\/p>\n

My mom had her moments. \u00a0She could be delightful. \u00a0Smart. \u00a0Laugh-out-loud funny. \u00a0Then, out of the blue, turn all Joan Crawford.\u00a0 If you don’t believe me, read my blog\u00a0Not Your Normal Trip to Trader Joes<\/a>\u00a0that I wrote last November.\u00a0 And now, here I am, cleaning up her mess, the landscape-of-her-psyche.<\/em>\u00a0Made visible.<\/p>\n

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Self-help books and Hefty Bags…the story of hoarding in one picture.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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The boxes and bags arrive at ground level from the attic thanks to the 1-800 team…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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These guys and gal were SO kind and helpful. The stuff is sorted, donated, re-purposed and according to them, very little ends up in the landfill.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And then there\u2019s my father\u2019s stuff. He was the organized one. The scientist. The one who saved bills and receipts and their mailing envelopes, going back to when Franklin Roosevelt was president. He received so many awards for his work as a writer and aerospace engineer. I take pictures of them. I take pictures of pictures. I’m doing my own hoarding, storing these electronic images somewhere in<\/em>“the cloud.”\u00a0Besides that, I have to look at every single scrap of paper in his office, on a mission to find social security numbers. \u00a0I am keeping the shredding department at Office Depot very busy.<\/p>\n

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I found my father’s old pipes. My friends…please don’t smoke.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Once in a blue moon I have a dream that is so vivid it feels like all the characters are real. The place is real. The time is real. I had a dream like that the night after I scoured the bottom drawer of a\u00a0tall file cabinet that was tucked into a dark, musty closet. That day I had gone back in time with him, reading the most excellent papers he wrote in high school. A young man before he became a husband or a father.<\/p>\n

In my dream I am in a laundromat washing my clothes when I glance up and see my father a few machines over. He is middle-aged and healthy, long before emphysema reduces his world to the size of the bedroom where the massive oxygen tank is hissing like a metal silo of snakes. And keeping him alive.<\/p>\n

But here he is, in my dream, doing his laundry. I can\u2019t believe it. My daddy. I catch his eye. Daddy! Daddy! He looks at me. No, he looks THROUGH me. As if I am invisible. The sudden despair I feel is crushing. I can\u2019t breathe and wake up gasping for air.<\/p>\n

My husband and I talk about the dream over dinner. \u201cWhat do you think it\u2019s about?\u201d he asks. I don\u2019t believe for one minute that my father actually visited me, like a ghostly apparition. But I have learned that all the characters in my dreams reflect some aspect of myself. After all, I\u2019m the one dreaming this stuff up. And there is something about washing. It\u2019s about taking something and making it new again. A fresh start. The father in my dream is washing something and so am I.<\/p>\n

The heart-wrenching part is that he doesn\u2019t recognize me while, at the same time, I am so happy to see him I\u2019m ready to dream-dance across the washing machines and hug him like there is no tomorrow. But this is my dream and those two seemingly disparate reactions belong to me. We are talking about letting go, aren\u2019t we? He is letting go of me. And ultimately, I am letting go of him. \u00a0Maybe in this dream my father and I are setting each other free.<\/p>\n

Part Two Coming Soon…<\/p>\n

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My mother and father…newlyweds and working in radio. A lifetime ago.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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My parents hung in there for 51 years…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hoarding is a big problem. It doesn\u2019t matter who you are, where you are from, how much money you have in the bank, or not. \u00a0Maybe saving stuff is like saving little slivers of ourselves. We know how this story of life is going to end. That we are marching, crawling, dancing, back-flipping toward the inevitable. Does squirreling the stuff away lull us into denial? Mute the truth? Massage our egos just enough to make it through one more day … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1853,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","kt_blocks_editor_width":"","_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[138,139],"class_list":["post-1846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogentry","tag-hoarding","tag-mental-illness"],"taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":2,"label":"blog entry"}],"post_tag":[{"value":138,"label":"hoarding"},{"value":139,"label":"mental illness"}]},"featured_image_src_large":["https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/hoarding-1-990x1024.jpg",990,1024,true],"author_info":{"display_name":"Cali Rose","author_link":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/author\/crbauthor\/"},"comment_info":0,"category_info":[{"term_id":2,"name":"blog entry","slug":"blogentry","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":2,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":138,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":2,"category_count":138,"category_description":"","cat_name":"blog entry","category_nicename":"blogentry","category_parent":0}],"tag_info":[{"term_id":138,"name":"hoarding","slug":"hoarding","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":138,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":3,"filter":"raw"},{"term_id":139,"name":"mental illness","slug":"mental-illness","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":139,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":1,"filter":"raw"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1846"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1876,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1846\/revisions\/1876"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}