Shaking the Sheets

This past month has felt like a transformation. The time leapt forward, the sun came out and made things warm. The sheets of snow turned to blankets of rain. And my two month headache and I-wonder-if-it’s-illness put me in the most intensive cocoon of it’s gestation so far. What is it about the seasons that allows for the shifting of the interior?

Align the many scraps around my house and studio and you will find a breadcrumb trail of what interests me. But at some point I feel my environment is fully breaded. Every year I announce a spring cleaning and some years I even mean it. This is one such. I want to shake out the sheets and not just to be on the other side, with an apartment different than the one I’m in now (shorn of cat hair, with a cleaned out pantry, a vague idea for a new piece of furniture). 

When my dad got sick, I was in New York, learning about discomfort and struggle. My sister had joined my mom in Richmond and was helping her to move up to Northern Virginia while also caretaking. It was relatively early in my father’s illness and I was mostly in a state of safety from my geographic buffer. Though I couldn’t deny what was happening, I gladly wrapped the miles around me like sleeping bag. Then one week I got a call from my mom.

She offered an ultimatum. Either you come down in the next week to claim your stuff, or it’s getting thrown away. Not only did this tear at my sleeping bag, it felt like a threat. Frankly, I was scared of my dad sometimes even when he was healthy. Never knew what to expect of him. Now with impending mortality, the great unknown had hinted at a chance of literally anything.

Overwhelmed with the energy steaming out of the phone, I dithered. I said I didn’t think I could make it, without really trying to get the time off. This excuse had worked before, because it was true, it was very hard to get off with short notice. But of course, these extenuating circumstances would clear a path if I wanted it. But how do you ask for something you’re afraid of?

In the days before the deadline, I tried to read the situation, but it was completely new. Being a sentimental person, raised by a sentimental mother, I really wanted to go through all my old stuff. But not rushed, not now, in a once safe space with the windows blown out. Even visualizing it, filling a duffel to heave in the chinatown bus and drop in the apartment, felt sordid. I gambled that my Mom was just threatening me because she was stressed, she wanted the help and so far I wasn’t providing it.

In my head I would come and help, just not yet. A little more time please. And I felt, when she actually held my old artwork, my writing from when I first started getting gold stars, the book my college girlfriend made for me, the story of how we met. When she held these in her hands how could she throw it all away?

But the anxiety of illness doesn’t leave the energy for sentiment. Even as a nurse, you can only play professional so many hours of the day in your own home, before it starts to overcome. You can no longer hang it up with your coat at the door. The hospital has come to you. And so a handful of random objects were saved, and the rest of my look-back possessions were gone.

It took a while to accept. I wasn’t ready for what it would feel like not to hear “we kept a few boxes,” even if it was in an annoyed tone. I felt I was being punished. Then I felt guilty for being more upset about my old things than my dying father. The shame was outsized and wrapped tight under my arms like the heart monitor my dad would sometimes wear to the gym. Uncomfortable, conspicuous, vaguely medical.

When looking back at what went wrong, I can see now that communication was the only real solution. I was scared to come home. If I had reached out to my sister and asked for the favor. Said, I’ll video call you. I’ll owe you forever. If I had talked to my job and told them my dad is dying, I have to go home for a few days. If any of it, then I would have more artifacts of my history.

I treated myself as though I’d lived through a fire. “It’s just stuff. It doesn’t make you who you are. And at day’s end, you have your health and safety. We didn't even lose the photo albums.” I repeated these lines many times, not naming the grief of losing such a trace of my wake. When a fire swells towards you, you have no time, no choice. And I had both and froze.

It is in this context that I’m thinking about freshening up and the thoughts that hold us back from what we want. I may not have any childhood bric a brac left over, but I have my memories, thoughts, and feelings. And anyone who’s gone deep in the brain closets will tell you, those are pretty powerful. They can dictate a lot in your present.

I have some big thoughts and feelings from my childhood, formed to protect me at my most vulnerable. But some of those thoughts and feelings need to be acknowledged and released. That’s something I’m doing in therapy, but also something I’m doing in writing. Sharing my experiences, as honestly as possible, in order to release some of the emotion still tied up in them. To offer myself, both now and then, some compassion in one of the best ways I know how. By telling their story.

I want to get rid of more things this year. Not in a sense that I own way too much, but that, I want to more deeply connect with who I am. I want to remove things I don’t use, to let go of projects I have lost interest in, and want to shed the stories I’ve kept just for myself. By writing them and letting them out, I free myself of a bit of the burden of being their only keeper. Of the pain of losing them from simply being too afraid to face them fully. And let them go.