Summer, Interrupted

I know there’s a lot going on in the U.S. and the world and that many other people are much worse off than me.

But my summer has been taken up by death-related administrative tasks, and because my brother is a failson, and because this cursed year keeps dropping turds in our path, it’s just been thing after thing after thing after thing.

I don’t need to go into detail because my daughter knows what I’m talking about.

I’m so frustrated. I hope next summer this will all be behind us and we can forget about it and just enjoy.

The Real Price of Clutter

Nothing earth-shattering this morning, just simple observation: Clutter is costly. Not in terms of money, although that can sometimes be part of it. But in quality of life.

Just as some background, my mom took pride in a clean, organized home. She never allowed anything to pile up for long, whether dishes or pieces of mail or laundry or just general “stuff.” And even though my parents had a lot, there was a place for every single item, and those items were almost always neatly tucked away at the end of each day.

This left time for family… eating dinner together, playing board games, homework, quiet time and reading, etc.

I am also quite sure my mother never felt shame in calling a plumber or electrician for an emergency repair, nor did she have to run some crazy gauntlet to tidy up before a gathering. The house was always presentable and always in a state of readiness.

Me? As a kid I kind of rebelled against this. I ignored my messes. I sidestepped the piles I created until my mom yelled or threatened or cajoled.

It was a terrible habit I carried into adulthood.

For a time, I was able to reform myself. This was back when my daughter was in high school and before my four grandsons came along. There was a brief period after my daughter and I moved into a small apartment in Oak Park where I did the chores religiously every weekend — laundry and cleaning and organizing. It was my Sunday routine.

My mother recognized this just before she died. She and my dad came down to celebrate my daughter’s birthday. When they arrived, they commented on how lovely the apartment courtyard looked with its blooming lilac trees.

Before they left, my mom glanced back around at the apartment and told me I was doing a great job. It was an uncharacteristic compliment.

A week later, she was gone.

Unfortunately, I’ve slipped back into my bad old habits. Mostly out of frustration. I am so overwhelmed right now with six of us living in my small condo. It is nearly impossible to get on top of any mess. It’s not enough to do weekly chores. Daily, and sometimes hourly effort is required, and it’s physically and emotionally exhausting. So I’ve returned to just sidestepping and ignoring piles again.

This takes its toll in terms of quality of life and family time. My eldest grandson, for example, loves board games. But I often hear myself saying things like “I can’t play right now but maybe later,” because there is always some household task in front of me.

Months and years can slip by like that if you let it. It’s not fair to him or to his brothers.

So, I’m working on a way to overcome our current predicament and help get us to a point where only regular maintenance is required for our living space.

I have no idea how I’m going to accomplish this yet, but it has to start somewhere, so I’m tackling it this weekend. I’m not trying to do everything all at once but will be happy if I can just get a couple of things accomplished — a corner decluttered, a box of donations to put in my car, a few shelves cleaned and organized…

The Things You Leave Behind

After dinner one night, my mother had been going about her usual routine of sorting laundry in the basement and hanging my dad’s shirts to dry.

As she took the first couple of steps up the basement stairs, she was struck by an aneurysm and fell backwards. A couple of hours later, my dad found her unconscious on the basement floor. He called the paramedics, and then me.

There was nothing they could do for her. They took her off life support after a long night in the ICU. My daughter and I kept vigil all through that night on the floor at the foot of her hospital bed.

The next morning, I returned to the house with my dad. The living room was like a shadowbox of my mother’s last moments. The lamp on the end table was still on. A soft pink throw blanket lay casually on the couch where she had left it to go down to the basement. Her Kindle sat on the glass-top coffee table next to the couch. Inside its cover were handwritten notes on yellow Post-Its with names of the characters and settings of the book she’d been reading — The Secret Wife by Gill Paul.

At the time my dad took care of settling my mother’s estate, essentially shielding my brother and me from all of the paperwork and pain of closing out a person’s life.

Fast forward to this year. My father died awaiting back surgery. He and his primary doctor had been working to get the date moved sooner because he was in so much pain.

Ironically, just a few hours after he died, the surgeon’s office called to say they were able to move up his surgery date.

My dad lived until his late 80s. I used to joke with him that he would outlive us all.

I think he kind of took that to heart. And I believed it too, after battling cancer and then severe osteoarthritis that put me in a wheelchair and required major surgery to walk again.

Like my mom, my dad left things behind. Amazon orders he’d placed a just day or two before his death, calendar reminders for his weekly bridge games that pop up on his phone that I am monitoring.

The hardest thing for me right now is seeing Google Photos Memories notifications on that phone.

Just yesterday it was a video he took of his Christmas tree from 2025, and the model train he had placed around its base. Holiday music was playing on his old stereo in the background. He was so proud of his train collection and wanted so much to share it with my grandsons.

And yet the video was painful and lonely to me. Because this past Christmas my daughter and grandsons and I were not able to go up to his house to celebrate or to enjoy the tree or the train. We had to host at my condo here instead.

We did go up to spend Easter with him, and my grandsons got to see his Christmas train layout in the basement. He kept it that way for them. And he had filled one of the train cars with jelly beans for them.

These little things meant everything to him.

I am now helping to settle his estate and facing all the things he faced several years ago closing out my mother’s life…

There is no clean ending or conclusion to any of this. Just the slow, quiet work of learning to carry what they left.