12/11/07: Goodbye to Mom's home

For two weeks, we've done not much besides emptying Mom's apartment. Like an archeological site, we peeled off the layers: stuff in daily use, stuff packed away for the past decade or so, stuff left over from even before that. Hard to believe there could be so much in one three-room apartment.

I have this problem about throwing out stuff, so it was harder than it might have been for a normal person (like Fumiko, just to take one example). The pile was slowly reduced, and we went every day to sort, give away, rearrange, and clean up. On almost the last day, I suddenly "saw" the full-length mirror attached to the inside of a closet door, and quickly found a home for that on freecycle. I took down the spice racks, the pencil sharpener, the picture hooks, etc.

On what we thought would be the last day, a high-end charity came with a truck to take away a bunch of things, but they rejected the dining room table, which I had been unable to sell. It was not "resalable," they said. Well, the top surface has a few bad places, but it's a very large, strong table. Seemed really useful to me. Anyway, we extended our effort for another day, hoping to find someone who wanted it for free. Despite a few inquiries, no one could pick it up right now, so I finally caved. The superintendent said we could just leave it there, so on Tuesday afternoon I formally vacated the apartment, abandoning the table.

The process itself was not painful for me, as some have kindly suggested, aside from an attack of nostalgia from time to time. Actually saying goodbye to the apartment brought a few tears, however, as I remembered how happy Mom had been here for 40 years, with its stupendous view from the 34th floor, and how hard I have worked for the past four years to enable her to stay here.

As an experience, emptying the apartment was interesting. It's not like actual moving, where you just decide what remains part of this collection of stuff, and then transport the collection to a new space. Here, the collection as an entity is terminated, and each item has to be dealt with individually (or did, with me...). I wanted to "find a good home" for each thing, and we largely succeeded. Very very little actually got trashed.

Returning home with our last load, we looked back on two weeks of ferrying things from Mom's apartment on the East Side to ours on the West Side. Arriving home each night, we are appalled at the mess we have created. There hasn't been time to unpack the boxes and store away the contents, so our apartment has become a warehouse with narrow aisles threading through. We had a celebratory glass of wine and sighed, putting off until tomorrow the next cleanup project.

I've also been catching up with doctor and dentist appointments, preparatory to diving into the Canadian health care system. Point A, we have a three-month waiting period before we can take advantage of that system; point B, I have good insurance here that can't be transferred, including dental insurance.