Last week, I missed posting to my blog due to a small adventure I have volunteered to take on: helping my mother move to a Independent Senior Living facility. She has lived in her small home since 1962. After a few recent falls this past year and time in the hospital, I needed to have “the talk” with her about living alone and my concerns for her safety. After touring many of these retirement locations, she settled on a facility where two other women from her church already reside. After my father died in 1995, she has been living on her own and has lived a life of little social interaction. I am very excited for her and she appears to be looking forward to the move.
Her present home has 900 square feet on the main level and her new apartment will be close to 1240 square feet, so we are quite confident that her furniture will fit in the new area. However, the basement “was” filled with many things that she will not need as a new apartment dweller. For those of you who have helped aging parents “downsize”, this can be at times, a daunting task. For my mother, each object has a story, a value, and a memory. As we continued through the process, I began to realize that it wasn’t just “stuff to be sold or given away” but each these stories were a “loss” to my mother. And as with all “losses”, time needs to be given to recognize and grieve.
I think the most traumatic part of all this for my mom was “where to start” organizing the move. For those who have moved to new residences, this doesn’t seen like a big deal, but she had never moved within the last 57 years. Within a span of 20 years, I have had three major moves, so I had some idea how to label boxes and organize areas: the “moving sale” area, the “donate” area, and the “throw out” area. Each day, for the last three weeks, we moved from room to room and garage, categorizing each item.
For the moving sale, we decided to transport these items to my house, since I have a double garage in which to move the sale in due to bad weather. I would bring out of her basement as many boxes as my SUV could hold. Then at night, I would go through the boxes and mark those moving sale items with a pink tag which signified that the item was hers. I would repack the boxes and stack them in my dining room until the moving sale which took place on May 31st and June 1st.
One of the things I was hoping to do for my mom was to take the proceeds from the sale of her items and purchase a new washing machine for her apartment. (Her apartment has washer/dryer hookups.) I still have some items that I have put on Marketplace and online rummage sales, but I anticipate that I’ll be able to do this for her.
Although this adventure took much time and effort, I feel that it was an opportunity for my mother and I to create new memories. Someone once told me that you never really know someone until you “go on vacation with them”, “marry them”, or “help them move.” I learned that my mom has a sense of humor that leans toward dark comedy. For example, one morning we were both downstairs cleaning out her kitchen pantry, and she appeared with a saw which was as tall as herself; (my mom is 4’11”.) She raised it above her head, like a “Lord of the Rings” character ready to smite an enemy and said, “Guess what this is used for?”
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