Dismantling a Life

January – February 2008

Who knows where one gets the energy to do Herculean feats?  Driven by the constraints of time due to my career and family, I went into hyper drive to create a plan for closing out Fern’s home in St. Louis and bringing her to live with my mom in Aurora, Colorado.  A point of interest about Aunt Fern is that she and her husband Joe were antique collectors…..for years.  They spent the better part of their marriage driving from one army base to another where my uncle would audit the bases for the US Government, and Fern would accompany him with their little Pomeranian dog at the time and make side trips all over the mid-west, eastern seaboard and southeastern US to auctions, antique shows and consignment shops.  Joe was especially fond of clocks.  Fern was fond of just about everything else and their house reflected this passion.

I made a trip out in January 2008 to understand what needed to get done.  As I surveyed the home I realized I didn’t know what was of value and what was just stuff.  So I enlisted the help of professional auctioneers who would categorize, price and sell the household goods.  It was a tremendous relief for me.  My goal was to get as much money as we could for Fern’s long term care and parting with some of that funding to pay the auctioneers who knew the value of the goods seemed a fair trade-off.  But there was still so much that Fern and I needed to do to get ready for the auction which we scheduled for mid-February.  The neighbor across the street had a son who was a realtor and we enlisted him to sell the property once we cleared out the house after the auction.

I returned in February to begin the task of clearing out Fern’s personal items and deciding what she would sell and what she would keep.  For a week we rummaged through cupboards, draws, boxes, and closets looking at each item and every scrap of paper.  As we sat on the floor going through things, I’d look at Fern and ask, “Keep it, sell it or pitch it?”  Initially, it was a mantra that started with, “keep it,” for just about everything.  Towards the end of the week, the common response was, “pitch it.”

We laughed, we cried, we reminisced and lamented about how a life well lived could be reduced to this.  Things well loved, refurbished and cherished sold to strangers.  Items with stories no one else would ever know reluctantly given to charity or thrown in the trash.  Scraps of paper with scrawled notes stating, “I’ve been robbed.”  “Someone is stealing from me.”  Written reminders for the benefit of Fern’s memory, telling me the story of what was happening before we were called in to help.

My heart broke for my aunt.  I cried many times that week, with her and alone, for loss of a lifetime of familiarity that would be no more.  Fern had a different road ahead of her but I reminded myself that she would have people who loved her there to help her make sense of things.