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The winter after I first took C. back to Ohio with me, we returned to help my parents move out of the house where I grew up. This had been a long time coming. After my father’s health had started to decline, my mother had begun lobbying for a smaller home, the kind with no stairs to fall down and less space to manage on their own. My father, while in theory not opposed to this plan, in practice had vetoed every place they visited. He liked their current house and declared himself comfortable in it; he did not declare, but all of us inferred, that he did not want to make so overt a concession to aging. It took five years for my mother to win him over.
By the standards of his generation—which, admittedly, were low ones—my father had always been relatively involved in household matters. In addition to classically masculine tasks like taking out the trash and mowing the lawn, he made lunch for my sister and me when we were too little to do so ourselves, helped put us to bed at night, did at least some of the cooking and dishes, loved to grocery shop, and, in his fifties, took over dinner duty entirely. Yet it was still my mother who, in ways aligned with their temperaments as well as their times, handled the lion’s share of domestic work throughout their marriage. She made all the meals that my father did not, ironed, swept, scrubbed, and vacuumed, tracked what food and other items needed to be replaced, kept us in clothes and school supplies, did the laundry, hired babysitters, sorted out after-school activities and car pools and pick-up arrangements, took us to doctor and dentist appointments, took time off from work when we were sick, and generally handled the everyday stuff of keeping a house and making a home.
On top of all this, it had always fallen to my mother to find those homes in the first place. It was she who had done the work of both choosing and settling into each one: the apartment in Michigan where my parents lived when they were first married, the one in Cleveland where my sister was born, the modest house they moved into to make space for a second child, the grand one they bought once my father’s career began to flourish. And so it was my mother who, beginning in her seventieth year, visited every viable piece of real estate on the market until my father, bowing to reality or simply to his extremely patient wife, finally conceded that the latest condo she had shown him seemed like a pretty decent place to live.
Then came the moving. Since my father was long past the stage where he could do any of the physical labor and my mother could no longer handle it all on her own, my sister and C. and I converged on Cleveland to help out. By then, C. and I knew each other well enough and had been back to Ohio often enough that I was no longer worried about the framed school pictures on the wall (which, anyway, she had taken one look at and loyally declared adorable) or anything else that the contents of the house might reveal about my past. And it was a good thing. Other than the internet, is there any richer source of potential embarrassment than a pack-rat parent and a childhood home? One afternoon, tasked with emptying the attic, we began going through an old steamer trunk that turned out to contain virtually every piece of my paper my sister or I had ever written on in childhood. C. fished them out one by one and, ignoring our laughter (plus the battered old stuffed animal I eventually threw at her), offered dramatic readings of dreadful grade school poetry and notes we’d passed in junior high and earnest fifth-grade book reports.
The next day, we laughed even harder when my sister, in the course of cleaning out the kitchen, found on top of the refrigerator an ancient kitchen witch—a cheery if somewhat deformed old lady perched atop a broom, meant to bring good luck to the home she adorned. By the looks of it, she had been acquired sometime around 1978 and forgotten sometime around 1984, which, give or take a few years, was turning out to be true of a considerable number of my parents’ possessions. By then, my sister and C. and I were three days into what was starting to seem like a three-thousand-day task, and we were growing collectively more amused, aghast, and overwhelmed with the discovery of each successive object. The witch on her scraggly broom was, so to speak, the last straw. My mother was in the next room and none of us wanted to make her feel bad, so my sister waved it around wildly but mutely, with a look, somewhere between distress and triumph, that plainly said that she had found the definitive example of the problem we were facing: how to clean out a four-story home that had been continuously occupied without any serious de-junking for thirty-plus years. The effort to not draw my mother’s attention somehow only added to the comedy of the moment; I had been sitting on the kitchen counter, like a teenager, and, doubled over, promptly slid off it.
It was good to laugh so much, and unexpected. Helping your aging parents move out of their longtime home is an exercise in watching the literal merge at every moment with the symbolic: the necessity of parting with so much all at once, the doors that close permanently behind them, the diminishing of the space they occupy in the world. I had thought, beforehand, that I would feel, in the midst of all this, a terrible two-way sadness, a sense of loss about the future as well as the past. But what I actually felt, along with the pleasure of being with my family, was tremendously lucky. I had learned, during my father’s long decline, to be just as grateful for what didn’t happen as for what did, and so I was relieved to be moving my parents out of that house while they were still there to laugh alongside us, before every hour we spent in it and every object we took out of it would have been steeped in grief.
It took several months, many more trips to Ohio, and countless excursions to Goodwill before that house was thoroughly empty and my parents were settled into their new home. In the end, despite all his resistance, it was an easy transition for my father. As usual, this was thanks to my mother, who managed to make the new place look remarkably like a miniature version of the old one. After dinner on their first night there, he settled into his preferred chair in the living room, the book he was reading on his lap and a glass of scotch on a familiar table next to him, and I sat across from him, marveling at how much he already seemed at home.