The recent conditions of my parents

Today, for the last time, I turned the lock of the small suite my
parents moved into nearly nine years ago. It’s empty – everything of
theirs given away, sold, or piled into a spare bedroom at our house!

My father died more than a year ago. My mother had hip surgery in
October and, unable to return to independent life, is waiting for a bed
in the Personal Care Home on the other side of this complex. Yes, she’ll
return to her beloved Donwood Manor, but never again to these
two-and-a-half rooms, to these particular conditions.

Eugene Peterson speaks of “conditions” in the opening pages of his latest book (a memoir called The Pastor).
He means the fact that his work, with the “immense mysteries” of God
and souls. was carried out in place and time. Place and time in their
most specific dimensions. There’s no avoiding the conditions, he says,
and so he wants to be “mindful” of them.

Closing down my parents’ suite has pushed me into mindfulness also of the recent conditions of their lives.

Even after I had a family and home of my own, I always enjoyed being
at my parents’ place. Their personalities, and therefore their furniture
and things, exuded welcome, comfort, and familiarity. But it feels
strange to be touching every item now, sorting, judging what to dispose
of and what to keep. And then disposing of or keeping it.

The suite is small, less than 400 square feet. It’s remarkable what
they managed to cram into it. I recall their 2002 move in, for example.
Mom, whose days of feeding a family of eight children were long over,
brought along her canning jars, and Dad, retired from the pastorate and
most public duties, brought along six suits. How painful it was to watch
him agonize over the need to cull commentaries and books and the tools
of his pastoral trade. (We now know he was also in the early stage of
Alzheimer’s disease.) And oh, how many books still came along with them!

As real space and time shrank with their move into the suite, and
with their growing immobility, I noticed that spatial references to a
world much wider and distant increased. Dad spoke more often of the
irrigation fields of southern Alberta and how proficient he’d been as a
young man at striding across them, opening and closing the water
channels. He spoke of his prowess as a baseball player, and the distance
his balls flew when he hit his regular homers. Mom reminisced with her
four sisters, all now living close to one another again, about running
through the bush, walking to school, clamboring about house and barn on
their Manitoba farm.

Around the time my parents moved into the suite, they planned for an
even smaller future, physically speaking, but a larger one nevertheless.
They shopped for graveyard plots and were enthused to make the
purchase, as if they’d finally found the perfect vacation condo. They
described the arrangement of trees in their chosen corner and recited
the names of others already “resting” there. Then I noticed they began
to read books about heaven and to talk about it more often. My mother,
in fact, although she’s been sad about it on occasion, has been
surprisingly unsentimental about giving up the suite. “I find I’m
thinking more about heaven than that place,” she said the other day.

These, and so many other memories — of every diminishment, of every
enlargement — have been in my mind as I’ve been clearing this, their
late home. But Saturday, washing the floor in the now empty suite, it
looking so unbelievably small, I had nothing left, it seemed. Only an
almost visceral sense of Mom’s efforts across this floor the last months
to get from her reading/TV chair to the bathroom. Over and over that
slow, pain-filled, trek with a walker, all the awkward and interminable
efforts at either end of the journey — to get up and down and up and
down again. Losses, the floor was telling me. Just losses. The reality
of large and small, present and past, inverted, completely confused for
the infirm and the elderly.

Today, though, when I locked up, glad to be finally finished, and the
morning sun pouring in through the east windows, I felt in that space a
glimpse of the lives my mom and late father had lived in that place,
diminished yet as deliberate and expansive as they were still able to
be. Before I turned the lock for the last time, I said a prayer of
gratitude for suite # 601 and 2002-11, their recent time and place.

Originally posted at Borrowing Bones.