After his mother moved to an assisted living facility and his father died, Jay Baruch and his sister faced the daunting task of clearing out and selling their parents’ home. Once the clutter is gone, Baruch writes, so are the anger and frustration.
The table that had been just inside the front door is gone when I enter my parents' house. Gone too are the bunches of keys, boxes of insulin syringes, stacks of bills, and photos of the kindergarteners my mother taught. Pushing through the front door of the now-empty house, I am shocked by the emptiness.
My mother, a tightly controlled diabetic who once checked her blood sugars so often that I feared she’d need a blood transfusion, landed in the hospital repeatedly with erratic blood sugars. Her dementia wasn’t obvious over Zoom, but when we spent time with her, her decline was painfully recognizable. And the debate over whether my father didn’t see it, or willfully hid it from us, further strained our relationship.
Eventually he caved, and was soon shipped to rehab and eventually, a lower level of care at the same assisted living facility where our mother lives. But soon after, another fall snapped his hip. He came through surgery well, but he never walked again. Two weeks later, I received a call from a New York number — an ER doctor.
Gone are the anger and frustration, the old grievances and petty fights that ultimately pushed us apart. In their place is regret — regret for the visits I didn’t make and the relationship I wanted to have, but couldn’t. I make one final pass up the too-steep stairs. I crouch on the floor with my back to the wall where an ornamental Persian rug once hung. It had also been featured prominently in the home where I grew up. But after my parents were gone, an antiques expert quickly disavowed us of the illusion of great value that was once a source of pride to a frugal engineer and teacher.
I cry for the six-year-old, waiting for his dad to come home from work as an aerospace engineer to add to their loose-leaf binder filled with clips from the Apollo 11 moon landing. I don’t know what was more magical — humans on the moon or this time with my dad. Using Magic Marker, I listed us as co-authors — that, I now realize, was my first “book.”
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