the arc of a life

Closet after closet, cupboard after cupboard, box after box we’ve been tackling Mum’s apartment. We’ve spent many days there, along with helpful siblings. My sis from South Surrey has helped and another came all the way from Fort St. John with her husband in their farm pickup truck. While there last week, we took a whole truck box-full of stuff to MCC, a 60s style stereo set (serious piece of wood furniture) to Value Village and they left with another truck box-full of stuff – chairs, patio furniture, a vintage Singer sewing machine (in its own wood cabinet of course), a tall wood cabinet, a dresser etc. It was a huge help!

By Monday it felt as if we’d finally made progress. I took down all the pictures, emptied stuff still left in some drawers and closets, tidied up the ends. Yesterday we spent the day boxing things like the Tiffany lamp, the microwave and kettle, taping up boxes already packed etc. etc. (when I write it down, it sounds so insignificant, yet somehow we managed to spend hours, busy the whole time – thus the ‘etc.s’). We’ll go again on Monday, the day before the actual move, to make sure that all the boxes and furniture to be moved are labeled, the diningroom table is taken apart, and generally I’m sure we’ll fill up many hours again with "etc."

Of course, after the move, the work isn’t done. Then we need to help Mum unpack in her new place as well as tie up loose ends in the Abby apartment (which we have for one more month). There is furniture for another brother from out of town to take and we’re hoping he comes with a BIIIIG truck so he can take the furniture plus all the boxes we’ve packed for siblings in Saskatchewan. When that stuff is cleared out, we dispose of what’s left (some appliances, more furniture and a lot of kitchen stuff) as best we know how – MCC, here we come - again!

A couple of things I’ve learned through this time:

1. I think now would a good time for me to start going through my own possessions, while my internal junk-meter is still finely tuned.

2. Going through the process of evaluating the detritus of one person’s lifetime has made me more keenly aware than ever of the arc of a life. I’ve handled, in the past days, stuff from every stage of mum’s life – her childhood, youth, falling in love and marrying a man she still adores, busy motherhood days on the farm, Daddy’s death when she was only 61, the ensuing 30 years spent as a single again, filled with hobbies, travel, friends and service....

I’ve seen how wrenching it has been for her to be forced to relinquish treasures – because things are never just glass, ceramic, paper, cloth. To the one who has lived with them, they embody pieces of oneself.

She has tried to leave each child, grandchild and great-grandchild something of herself. This is hard when the recipients aren’t there to pick a thing they would find significant, and those of us who are there demur when she offers us this thing or that, as we work out in our own minds, where it will fit in our own mess of stuff.

This moving business has brought home to me more forcefully than ever:

- Things don’t last or retain their value.

- Some things have value not for the final produce but because of what the process of getting to the final product does for us. For example, Mum used to collect poems and clever sayings and compile them into scrapbooks. I’m not sure what happened to those scrapbooks, but I know I didn’t want them and I’m not sure if anyone did. But that doesn’t mean the effort expended in putting them together was wasted. Because in the process of doing it, Mum was blessed, fulfilled and nurtured in some way and that too has value.

- We come into this world with nothing; we leave with nothing. In between we may amass houses and apartments, dish sets, furniture sets, closets full of clothes, and cupboards full of appliances, tools and books. But each stage after mid-life demands a paring down till we get to the point of next-to-nothing again.

- If all this stuff doesn’t last, if no one wants the things that we feel embody our significance (the crafts we’ve made, teacups and spoons we’ve collected, diaries, journals and books we’ve written, or whatever), does that mean we’re cancelled out?

Of course not. Our significance, in the end, is wrapped up in the mark we leave on lives. In that department, Mum can be pared down to nothing yet the impact she’s made with her values, her creative way of looking at life, her positive attitude and the set of beliefs by which she’s lived will reverberate in the lives of her dozens and dozens of friends and through the generations of her family. I hope that someday the same thing can be said about me.