Featured, Presence

Saying Goodbye to the Kitchen Table

July 20, 2018

My Mom’s Table, before the clearing.

Last July was not my favorite month, and this one is not shaping up to be much better.

A year ago this month, my active 87-year-old Mom drove herself and her friend to church at the beginning of the week, and by week’s end learned that she had terminal brain cancer and only a few months to live.  We lost her last November.

This July, we are dealing with my Mom’s stuff.  Still dealing with it, actually.  We’ve been trying for much of this year to get her five bedroom, two story house emptied out.  In May, we had a four day estate sale, run by a competent, kind antiques expert.  When the estate sale bombed (the estate sale company owner told me it was probably the worst sale he’d had in his 20 plus years of estate sale business), we rallied and had a one day garage sale.  Everything that was left in the house after 2 pm was marked “free.”  There is still enough there to fill a truck.

My sister and I want to be wise stewards of everything that is left. It looks, though, like we are going to be packing a lot of boxes and making multiple trips to the Salvation Army. The house needs work before it can be sold, and the work can’t start until the house is empty.

Until now, I have been strangely OK with watching my Mom’s beloved possessions go to new owners. This part of the process, though? The end part?  It has been rough. Maybe the reality of what we had to do didn’t hit me sooner because my favorite furniture pieces didn’t sell. I was secretly happy about that. Whenever I’ve dropped by her house recently, even after the sales, I could still toss my bag on the hutch and sit at the kitchen table. I could grab a soda from the refrigerator and imagine that my Mom had just stepped out to do errands, that she’d be back any minute to have a Diet Pepsi with me.

The kitchen table is one of the hardest pieces to let go; I’m surprised that nobody wanted it.  It’s solid oak and heavy. Mom rescued it from outside her church in Woodland Hills, years before they moved up North, even before I was born. It was out for the trash, but she took it home and refinished it.  It made the move up North and has been in the same place in the dining room for nearly 50 years. It was  where she and my Dad read the paper and had coffee. It was where we had thousands of family dinners, where I grew up and celebrated just about every birthday and where my sister brought her husband-to-be to meet everyone for the first time.  My parents played pinochle with my grandparents there. It’s where we ate my Grandma’s homemade pies.

In recent years, four generations gathered around that table.  It had two sections that could be added to make it bigger. I remember all the times I stood on one end of the table while my Mom stood on the other, and I pulled the rings, and we added the extra sections, then put on a tablecloth and brought out Aunt Gertrude’s fancy china (which was also leftover after the sales. Nobody wanted it either. Not even for free.)

And that couch in the living room? It’s where my Dad watched baseball. I sit there and know that I am exactly where he used to be.

The couch needs to go, though. So does the table. So do all the blankets and sheets and quilts, the pancake flippers, the iced tea maker, my Mom’s shoes and dresses and pants, the coffee mug that says Ken.  Yesterday, my niece posted photos of the table on the local Facebook yard sale site; we finally found a taker when the price was free.

I’m not sure how I am going to make it through this.

But here is a small thing that is helping me. I do not know if it is a dream, a vision, or maybe just a wish.  I believe it is a gift.  I see myself and my sister with my Mom and Dad. We are walking hand in hand, and I am in the middle. We are leaving the big house, the house where I grew up, the house where the table still sits, the house where my Mom died. We are going away, possibly on a trip, and we are not sad.  Nobody is worried about the house, or anything that is left there.  We pause and watch as a parade of stuff moves joyfully out of the house and finds new people, new life. We wave goodbye and walk down a different road, setting out on new adventures ourselves.   In the vision, I know that my Mom and Dad are still with me, that the stuff is just stuff, and they are OK with seeing it go. They are still holding me, and their love remains, even after everything else is gone.

 

 

Presence

When Your Wallet Falls Off the Top of the Car

June 26, 2018

 

Today, my daughter called me in tears. A phone call from my 17-year-old usually means bad news. She is not part of the generation of phone callers. Her preferred mode of communication is Snapchat. She texts occasionally. But phone calls?  Only if the situation is dire.

My first panicked thought? Car accident. I remembered making a call like that to my parents when I was 17 or so. A friend and I had driven to Sacramento, about 40 miles away from our home town, to write a story for our school newspaper about a homeless shelter there. I pulled into traffic on a one-way street and ran into someone.  It was a minor fender bender; no one was hurt. Looking back, that accident would have made a better story for the paper than the one we actually wrote.  I think  I was too embarrassed to tell anyone about it, though.

The car was fine. My daughter was distraught, though, because her wallet was missing. She thought she left it on top of the car after she got gas. A few minutes later when she went to 7-11 to buy a Slurpee, she couldn’t find it. She checked in the car, then drove back to the gas station to see if someone had turned it in, but no one had. She walked up and down the road (my mother alarm bells go off at this information, but I demonstrate remarkable self-control and don’t mention it).  She said, through more tears, that it was just gone.

I told her it was OK, that we all did things like this, and that there was nothing in the wallet that couldn’t be replaced. Yes, it would be a nuisance to get a new driver’s license, student identification card, debit card, library card. We would do it, though.  We would fix it.

I used my best motherly soothing voice.

She didn’t seem convinced.

I told her to sit in the car, eat her lunch that we packed that morning, drink some water.  I told her to slow down, catch her breath. I called my husband, and he said he would leave work to meet up with her.

That could have been the end of the story.

Somewhere, though, in the midst of those phone calls, my insurance office left a voicemail which I almost ignored. They call occasionally to see if we want to discuss our policies; I was not in the mood. But this voicemail was different.  The secretary said a man named Bill had just called and told her that he was pulling onto the freeway when he saw papers flying around. He stopped and picked up what he could.  Our insurance card was there, with the only phone number in the whole bunch. He hoped they could reach us.

I called my daughter back.  I called my husband back.  I told them the good news, that someone had picked up some of her papers.  Then I called Bill. (Some days, God’s grace seems to show up through a lot of phone calls, no?) He answered right away. He said he picked up what he could.  He had a $20 bill and seven $1 bills.  Also, her drivers’ license, debit card, library card, and student ID card.

In other words, he had everything.

Some days, you leave your wallet on top of the car and think everything is lost, but somebody sees and stops and picks it all up and then figures out a way to let you know.  It’s not everyday this happens. Sometimes, the wallet is just gone. On those days, it’s not that God forgets us; grace just looks different from what we expect or hope. Today, though, my girl got to see God take care of her in a practical way:  through a stranger named Bill, a local heating and air conditioning contractor, who stopped on the side of the freeway to gather up what she forgot and who made sure it got back to her.