When I was home this past December, my stepmother assigned me the task
of helping my dad go through and get rid of stuff in the closet of his
office. When I think back to everything that happened during that
vacation, the trips that I took, friends I saw, conversations I had or
tried to have, my happiest thoughts are of time spent on that bloody
closet.
My father's intellectual capacities seem to be declining
quickly. I already knew that he could no longer remember phone
conversations the that we have or even that they had happened after the
fact. I was unprepared for just how much the present moment escapes
him. Maybe it is not that the actual present moment escapes him.
Rather, it is that he continues to exist almost solely in the present
moment and has trouble remembering the ones just past.
Either
way, conversations about anything but the distant past seemed to move at
a glacial speed, if at all. Ask him what he was doing when President
Roosevelt died and out comes a great story. Ask him what he had for
dinner or just ordered at a restaurant and he has no idea.
It is
with this in mind, that we ventured into his office. In addition to
separating things for goodwill, one of the major jobs was to find and
shred old financial documents. Once upon a time in the not too distant
past, my father had a fair number of investments. In the process of his
decline, he lost a lot of money. We don't know where it all went, but
by the time we realized how bad things had gotten and my stepmother
finally took over his finances a great deal had been lost to shady
brokers, market declines, charities, political causes, vitamin salesmen,
mail order smoked salmon and God knows what else. What was left to be
gotten rid of were folders, binders and old cardboard boxes full of a
paper trail of now lost wealth.
On days that I was home, the
scene was set with myself alternately poking about in the closet and
sitting on the floor shredding. My dad would sit in a chair slowly
reading through a box of old class notes. The shredder served as a
rallying cry to my father. He would hear it and then come to the office
to make sure that I wasn't destroying something important. Invariably
he would ask me if I had brought the machine with me. I would tell him
that it belonged to his wife, and he would settle into the chair to
continue his slow sifting through notes and newspaper clippings.
There
were some exciting finds in the labyrinthine closet. My favorite was a
letter that he had written to his Aunt Mildred in 1960 when Kennedy was
elected. There was also a great stash of forgotten food stuffs buried
throughout the closet. I removed 3 expired tins of fish, 4 cans of
soup, an expired jar of peanut butter, a box of instant mashed potatoes
and a bag of potato chips, mercifully unopened. There was also a 6" X
12" filled entirely with return address labels and other thank you gifts
from charities including six unopened American flags.
In the
recycled envelopes with tax returns from the 1980's and canceled checks,
I found record of a loan that my mother took on after the divorce. My
father had cosigned. I also found a three ring binder detailing his
father's slow decline from Alzheimer's. I could only read as far as the
first letter from my uncle describing some of his symptoms and the
infamous incident when he disappeared into the woods in Wisconsin, which
resulted in a massive search with a local team and dogs. This was the
end of my grandfather's summers in Wisconsin, one of the few places he
remembered.
Amongst the recyclables were incredible stacks of
investment and health magazines. At one time organized into labeled
binders, all of them had my father's tell tale underlining throughout to
show that he had read them and what he had found important or useful. I
threw these magazines out with relish just as I shredded the record of
the loan, I shredded the history of my father's obsessions: investment
and avoiding his father's fate through living a better life. Anyone
could see how futile both of those exercises turned out to be.
In
the days that I worked and thinned out the closet, I got rid of a box
of unused candles, bags of clothing, 4 trash bags of shredded papers and
a few carloads of recycling. My dad got through about 1 box of old
class notes. I kept asking him if he thought he would use it again. He
would say, "Oh, I guess not." Then he would part with a few sheets of
paper but decide to keep some others. At one point, I asked him what he
was reading. He said is was an article about Nixon, but really it was
about Bush II.
Somehow, even with the emotional baggage of so
much that I was finding, this was a happy time for me. We were doing
something together. We barely spoke, but it was alright. We've always
been quiet, except for talking about political things or family gossip.
This is just how we both are; sometimes socially inhibited but with a
lot of pent up passion that spills forth into the things we really care
about. We both like to putter, read and run. We enjoy planting things
and looking at trees. Though not easily aroused, we both have volcanic
tempers but love very deeply and loyally. These things seem to be the
essence of my father, and I am sorry that it has taken his stripping
bear, his slow deconstruction for me to realize just who he really is
underneath all that he had seemed to be for so long.
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