Am I Ready?

"Please, Mom, just let me get rid of it,", I said imploringly as I looked deep into my Mother's fading blue eyes. Throughout my life my parents both liked to unofficially collect things and would always have a great justification why that would be a great thing to hold onto "just in case". Most of those things ended up broken or decayed, but that didn't stop them from holding onto most things they bought or were gifted in their lives. Over time, age and disease took over any rational thought patterns and abilities.

We had reached a point in our finite time on earth where it was impossibly difficult to communicate in a productive way with Mom anymore. Her mind had reached the outer limits of whatever was left that it recognized, and I realized at that moment these messy piles and towering mountains of goods all over her home was her way to cling to those fragments. The few scraps her memory could still access and recall. And in that fleeting moment I felt immense sympathy for my Mother.

Once the juncture had passed, reality surfaced and slapped me awake. I was still waiting for her reply, so I asked again, "Can I please just throw this broken lampshade away? It is beyond repair, it's chipped and frankly, outdated, so I am just going to place it over here, ok?", and without waiting for her response I walked across the room to place it on the "soon-to-be-junk" pile. Mom thought this pile was the "save-for-later" pile, so it was a bit easier to get her to add items there. In the past I had tried devoting a pile to things we could revisit for reassessment once we had finished sorting through the house, but after a few weeks of this, I started noticing the items from that pile had been placed in new homes around the house, so I modified the sorting groups we used. It seems to be less stressful for Mom to sort her things this way so I am happy to keep it up.

My Mom had never responded to my question and was now intently sorting through a box, so I took this opportunity to grab some items and move them towards the front door for easier removal later. Over the years, I had developed tactics and methods to declutter the home without alerting her to my actions, and when my Father was alive, it was easier to keep her hoarding in check and these methods worked well to do that. Once she was all alone after my Father passed away, "Shopping and Repurposing" became her new daily routines and after a while it became overwhelming being in her house. My Brother and I tried to help her but she is stubborn and refused to admit there was an issue and he kind of started to spiral in his own way. I decided that this would be too much stress for him; he had a clueless airhead wife at home, he was co-parenting 2 young children under 6 years of age, and he was the sole breadwinner. I felt he had enough on his plate and would only hinder our decluttering progress so I gladly took this project on for myself.

It was a real struggle at first. I tried having her therapist come in to work with us, I brought her to a friend’s house on a few occasions, we even shipped her off to the cottage for a week, but no matter what distraction we tried, she would catch on eventually since her mind was still somewhat lucid. As the progression of the disease intensified, I had to start babying her and providing her with information in much smaller sized packets at a time and this was not as overwhelming for her and she didn't seem to hoard as frequently when she wasn't overloaded with too much stimulation. If there were 3 topics to discuss, I had to break it up into 3 different separate conversations over at least a 60 minute period. Even then it became increasingly more difficult to communicate and she refused to move or accept full-time help. So I have been managing the hoard and her mental state to the best of my capabilities, and I think my “many piles” method was the most successful strategy yet.

As I sifted through a mountain of travel magazines my left foot had recently uncovered, I heard my Mom gasp from the other side of the room. I turned to see what had happened and she suddenly burst into laughter as she lifted something out of the box. Her face was wearing one of the biggest smiles I had seen in years. Her eyes were lit up and appeared full of life, a warmth and comfort washed over my body witnessing this moment of sentimentality my Mother was having. She was holding a picture frame and was touching the faces of the people in the photo with the tips of her fingers. She was moving them up, down and across the glass of the frame, from person to person. I was curious who was in this photo that she was loving so much, and I felt some trepidation as I walked over to check it out.

It was an old photo of our family in my childhood home and my Brother had to be all of 2 years old. My Father had his hands wrapped around my Brother’s waist while he sat upon my Father’s shoulders. My Brother was laughing hysterically and had his hands waving above his head. My Mom was standing to the right of my Father, and I was standing between them. My Mother and I were both looking up at my Brother laughing just as hard as he was and my Father was trying to see what my Brother was doing and so his face looked hilarious! I saw and felt the love we had shared as we laughed together in the photograph. I did not remember the day that was so perfectly captured, nor do I recall if I went to bed that night still smiling.

However, I noticed something sitting on the table in the background, an intricate and colourful lamp. My Mother touched her finger to the lamp, looked at me and said, "I remember when your Grandfather painted that lampshade, it was a week before your 3rd birthday. He had asked you what your favourite animal was, you said giraffes and he painted a mural of different giraffes on it as your gift. You used to spend hours looking at it and spinning it around to make believe the giraffes were in a parade! What a great day this was, you kids refused to go to bed that night and wanted the 4 of us to stay up and play all night long".

Suddenly her eyes began to fade and the smile rapidly melted off her face, I wistfully recognized the dementia had regained control of her brain. She furrowed her brow as she looked at the photo, clearly unsure of who she was looking at anymore. I told her I thought she looked great as I pointed to her in the image, but she had already checked out and was no longer paying attention to the picture. She turned away from me, placed the frame back in the box and pushed the box as far away as she was able. She leaned back in the chair, let out a big sigh and closed her eyes as she relaxed further into the seat, almost instantly beginning to snore.

I walked back over to the soon-to-be-junk pile and had an emotional moment with the broken lampshade that I now realized had painted giraffes all over it. I finally understood my hastiness while my eyes scanned the room I was still standing in, stopping on the various mounds of junk, wondering how many other beautifully curated family artifacts were buried or had been lost in them and discarded. I picked up the cracked, chipped and faded piece of personalized art and turned it over and over in my hands as I saw how much attention to detail my Grandfather had put into this gift. My heart swelled with love and nostalgia and I thought to myself, "Am I ready to let this go?"