By Andrea Eschen
“Sorry, I can’t talk now,” my 94-year-old mother says on the telephone. “My mother’s coming to see me, and I have to clean my room, or she’ll be mad at me.” She’s referring to me. My mother is a bit confused but not at all senile. I’m about to tell her I’m reconsidering my plans to fly to California from Washington, D.C., to visit her during the state’s sudden stay-at-home order to control the coronavirus.
“You’re not going to change your plans, are you?” she interrupts. Suddenly, I couldn’t say “no” even though seeing each other, even masked, would put us at risk. She’s had death on her mind for several years, though it now looms larger.
“I want you to help me clean out my closet. I want to be prepared and not leave you three children with a lot of work when I’m not around,” she says. She’s asked the most efficient, organized, and task-oriented child of her three—me—to carry out the job. My Narnia project is five feet long and three feet deep. I can be ruthless when it comes to throwing things away. This visit, there’s no time to waste.
The first morning, I leave her apartment, masked, to buy provisions before non-essential businesses close: plastic green trash bags for recycling papers, boxes to store what was to be kept, and plastic containers to hold odds and ends. Materials at my side, I pull up a stool in front of the sliding mirror doors and haul out the first row of boxes. Rummaging in a large one that in the 1960s contained laundry soap, I extricate six disintegrating manila envelopes labeled France, Italy, Switzerland, England, Holland, and Austria. A coughing fit seizes me as the dust blanketing them finally finds its freedom. I remove maps, menus, postcards, itineraries, and tourist brochures—souvenirs from her bicycle trip through Europe in 1954. This must have been her last whirlwind trip when she was single and before I was born three years later.
“Mom, do you still want these envelopes from your bicycle trip?”
“I might want to look at them sometime.” She has said the same thing on my prior visits.
She has not looked at them. I place them back in the box, label it “TOSS” with a thick blue Sharpie, and position it by the bedroom door. While she’s absorbed reading the newspaper, I tiptoe out of the apartment to deposit the box in a recycling bin.
I don’t protest or ask her how I’m supposed to clean out the closet if she doesn’t let me get rid of anything. Up to now, she has believed there will be time to sort through documents and photographs, but after her daily routine of applying face creams and eye drops, fiddling with her hearing aids, searching for misplaced lists, organizing her desk, and dining with her boyfriend secluded in his apartment, little time remains for reminiscing.
I step back from the job to assess progress. The brown paper and green plastic bags and cardboard boxes on the carpet within arms’ reach remain mostly empty. The open closet displays another fifteen unopened boxes. Too many decisions about what to retain and what to discard swirl around. Needing an easier task, I push aside the bags and boxes destined for the trash and retrieve the eight boxes of family photographs, memories tossed in random boxes after my mother’s burgeoning household and childrearing responsibilities left her no time to glue them in albums. My mother walks in and stares at the piles of photographs surrounding my feet. “You’re not going to throw any of those away, are you?”
“No,” I assure her. “I’m just organizing them.”
On the second day, as I’m perched on the stool hovered over my task, my mother strides in with an empty wastebasket in one hand and a fistful of photographs in the other. “I found these in the recycling when I took out the garbage. Just what are you throwing away?” She hands me the photographs to return to their respective boxes. I squint at a former neighbor, a blurry Egyptian pyramid, and a tailgate picnic at the ’75 Stanford – Cal football game. The pictures nestle into hundreds of others before I sneak to the floor below to recycle them.
I linger by the bin. I want to help her with a job that daunts her, but guilt and sadness seep through my fingers as the photographs drop. She has entrusted me with decisions about her past and I’m taking advantage of her fading present. My musing skips to when only her spirit resides in her apartment. My brother, sister, and I will review each possession and family treasure, deciding through tears and laughter its destiny. At least the mirrored doors of the bedroom closet will reflect order; she’d be mortified to leave a mess behind.
My mother’s beautiful face will soon join the others jumbled in a box or the trash can and memories of her will fade like they have with the other relatives. In several decades, will a family member find in an envelope her obituary describing the cause of death? Will COVID-19 sweep her away?
The dead can wait.
“Mom, how about taking the afternoon off?” The regional shutdown limits our options – no restaurants, movies, or museums. The thought of exposing her to a lurking virus at For Eyes, Kiehl’s, or Trader Joe’s, necessary errands, repels me. “How about a Sunday drive out to the coast? We can have a tailgate picnic away from crowds.”
This time, she doesn’t say, “I can’t. I have to clean my room.” If the virus sneaks up on her, she would rather have walked at Point Reyes National Seashore, savored a sandwich during a picnic lunch, and enjoyed an excursion with her daughter than investigate what I’ve thrown away. We won’t throw away her last days either.