The Dying House

 My parents’ house is dying a slow death.  I’m scared that important parts of me may be dying with it.  Parts I may not be able to save.  

When you’re young, you don’t notice what your house is all about, you only care about your own room and about how many knick-knacks clutter the bookshelves if it is your job to dust around them.  Now when I go into that house, the empty shell of our family’s existence, my perspective has changed.

This simple ranch house was the All-American package for our clean cut, Leave it to Beaver life.  There were only four of us, Mom, Dad, my brother and me, but we were enough to fill that house with personal significance during the 70’s and 80’s.  Eventually my brother left, and then I did, but the house was always home base, even years after we had set up housekeeping in other places.  Mom and Dad carried on there, keeping things pretty much the same.  Two years ago, Mom died, and Dad had to move to a memory care home.  Our house now sits empty, steadfast, standing by.

It’s perched on the bulb of a cul-de-sac, in a decent neighborhood in a good school district.  If you drove by, you wouldn’t consider it special.  Taupe wood siding and red brick cover the exterior.  The front lawn is all grass with one or two trees.  Lawns are important here in Indiana, and this one bears the proud, diagonal lawnmower lines that prove it’s well-kept.  The lot is almost a half-acre, typical for this neighborhood, but it seems vast compared to where I live in LA.  

Selling this house is going to take a lot of effort, soul searching, and tears.  My brother will want to hang on to the house as long as possible and won’t want to get rid of anything. He wants Dad to be able to come home to die.  I fall closer to the pragmatic, the realist who knows that the great and painful purge has to happen, and perhaps we should get going on the work now and not wait for Dad’s demise.  Somehow, we will have to meet in the middle.

It’s the purge part that fills me with anxiety and sadness.  I know we can’t keep everything, but getting rid of the things our parents held dear feels like a betrayal.  As I look around the rooms, so familiar, I’m once again faced with old feelings of guilt, of not measuring up to my parents’ expectations.  I believe that my parents wanted me to share this particular concept of what home is, to be surrounded by relics from the past.  While I wasn’t a rebel in any way, I was clear about not wanting to stick around, and I think that was hard for them.  Why wouldn’t I want to be just like them?  It’s a question I even ask myself.  

Selling family heirlooms feels like putting nails in my parents’ coffins.  While they weren’t hoarders, they did accumulate their share of household inventory over the years.  They still have the dining room set they bought when they were newly married.  The twin beds in their bedroom.  Dad’s desk in the den.  The red wing chairs in the living room. Countless antiques picked up along the way that supported and evoked my mother’s vision of Early Americana.  Trendy was never a word to be used in the same sentence as my mother.   I think she wanted to capture and pay homage to an ideal of sorts.  A period of time she felt exemplified the best of civilization, the dawning of the shining city on the hill, this America, and while I never had anything against her style, I never wanted to embrace it.

Now that the house is empty and quiet, it’s like walking through a museum after hours, dark and immobile. It reminds me of the fourth-grade local history field trips we used to take.  The exhibits are carefully curated, but of interest to only my brother and me.  Even when we were all living there, it felt like that, like a shrine to people from a bygone era, most of them my ancestors.  There are any number of old sconces and hurricane lamps, old side tables and tools.   There are old cabinets filled with old books and score upon score of old pictures.  Most of the pictures are of relatives from both sides of the family.  I know who most of them are and how they fit in, thanks to Mom’s diligent references over the years and the fact that the pictures never moved or changed.

What my mother was trying so hard to preserve, I’m not sure.  I only know it was very important to her.  There are a few photographs of current day family, including me and my children, but they are far outnumbered by portraits and possessions of loved ones I never met.  My great-great-grandfather’s Civil War musket hangs over the bookcase, so long a fragment of my life’s set design that I rarely even notice it.  A great-aunt’s grandfather clock.  Some of it was in the family, and some of it was acquired to augment Mom’s Early American mood.  Maybe creating this shrine was her way of dealing with some guilt of her own, forever apologizing for something.  What was it she was sorry for?

I think I always knew I had to move away, that if I stayed within a 2,000-mile radius of this house I would never be able to become something else.  Whenever I was back to visit, I slipped right back into those old routines.  I had been carefully taught to honor the past. Creating my own future felt selfish, but necessary, and moving far away seemed like the only way for me to have a shot at it.  

Recently, I had a few days alone in the house.  Where once there was my mother’s voice and the underlying drone of a TV set, there is now silence.  Where Dad used to sit at the kitchen table every morning reading every word of two papers, there is only the old avocado green woven placemat. On the kitchen stovetop, the electric kind with the coil burners that sit up from the surface, Mom’s teakettle sits unused.  Above that is a shelf where she kept a salt and pepper shaker, hung her measuring cups, and displayed her mother’s potato fork.  Time and again she would mention this fork, used for sticking into baked or boiled potatoes to see if they were cooked.  It was a keepsake as valued as any piece of jewelry. It represented who her people were, sturdy European farm stock settled into small towns in northern Indiana.  The women were no-nonsense and reliable cooks.  The potato fork was a reminder of all those who went before my mother who never had her access to education or careers.  It’s just one of many items Mom made sure I knew about and made sure I knew she wanted passed on.

She would often wonder about certain pieces, ask if I would want them, and then immediately say, “Well, I don’t know where you would put that in your house.”  Which was part realization and part guilt slinging of some kind, making me feel bad for not having a house that could also be turned into an early American showcase.  Mom has two massive photographic prints of her grandparents, Daisy and Alonzo.  They are so large that she couldn’t even hang them in one room.  Alonzo is in the dining room while Daisy holds court in my brother’s bedroom.  Each is encased in a heavy, ornate wood frame and they each probably weigh forty pounds.  How audacious of them to have these portraits made!  Mom would sometimes sigh and ask, “Who will want Daisy and Alonzo?” The answer, unfortunately, is no one. This lovely young couple from Elkhart, Indiana, who in 1900 bore my grandpa and his twin sister, who were the vital continuation of a family line that eventually came to bear me, and then my own children, are going to wind up in the dusty backroom of some roadside antique store, if they make it that far.  The pictures might be bought for the frames, after which Daisy and Alonzo may meet their final fate by being cut from their resting places and set out back to be recycled, gone forever.

I feel like the relics in the house are staring at me like frightened animals wondering what will become of themselves, looking at me with blinking eyes asking, “What’s next?” I’ve grabbed a couple of things, like the potato fork and a small, black and white photo of my Great-Grandma Peggy and my Great-Aunt MaBelle, two badass women from the early 20th century who were known in our family for gritting their teeth and getting on with life.   Between the two of them, they weathered poverty, insufferable husbands, serious illness, and a child’s violent death.  Any scars were internal, any grief unspoken.  They would never have fretted over old family photos or “the good china.”  They had lost too much, too many things to think that things held that much value.  MaBelle died at 98-years-old, likely with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of scotch in the other, having long since settled any debts with the past.

Am I scared that part of my history will die with this house?  That I’ll lose the memories only my brother and I share?  Or am I more scared of the guilt that will come when we sell our parents’ things? The house is full of meaningful possessions, although the people who knew the meanings are gone.  Will our memories die too?  How long can my brother and I hang on to old stories from Christmas dinners and school programs and visits from cranky uncles?  Will anyone but me ever care about the potato fork?  Wherever Mom is, will she be mad if we let some of the things go, their backstories forever forgotten?  

As I stand in the stillness of the kitchen, I can feel the tide coming in on this house.  Already the water is lapping at the sandcastle, eroding the life that our family breathed into the walls, the floors, the sofas and chairs.  This candle is dimming, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to think or do.  What do we save?  What else do we throw into the lifeboat and what do we let fall, sinking under the weight of the guilt of moving on?  How do we commit to our own memories, my brother and I, enough of the fabric of what made us, and how do we take away enough hard evidence of the love and the simple, everyday living that made that house, that unassuming ranch house in the suburbs, a sacred space?  How do we bottle or box up or ship out all that the house means to us, and then leave the rest to be completely remodeled into someone else’s vision of home? And how do we walk away, someday to drive by again and wonder what’s going on in there?  

The shifting of the physical proof of our family story to the memory of it is a tender process.  What you can touch slips through your fingers, and you are left only with what you can remember.  I hope we do it justice, this dismantling of the past, this transition from things to feelings.  I’m ready to let all the unmet expectations and guilt go out with the receding water.  I look at the photo on my desk of those two remarkable women and silently choose to follow their lead.  I can only hope that somewhere, Mom is now in a peaceful place where she can say, “What’s the big deal?  It’s just an old potato fork.”