Saying Goodbye to the Kitchen Table

Last July was not my favorite month, and this one is not shaping up to be much better.

A year ago this month, my active 87-year-old Mom drove herself and her friend to church at the beginning of the week, and by week’s end learned that she had terminal brain cancer and only a few months to live.  We lost her last November.

This July, we are dealing with my Mom’s stuff.  Still dealing with it, actually.  We’ve been trying for much of this year to get her five bedroom, two story house emptied out.  In May, we had a four day estate sale, run by a competent, kind antiques expert.  When the estate sale bombed (the estate sale company owner told me it was probably the worst sale he’d had in his 20 plus years of estate sale business), we rallied and had a one day garage sale.  Everything that was left in the house after 2 pm was marked “free.”  There is still enough there to fill a truck.

My sister and I want to be wise stewards of everything that is left. It looks, though, like we are going to be packing a lot of boxes and making multiple trips to the Salvation Army. The house needs work before it can be sold, and the work can’t start until the house is empty.

Until now, I have been strangely OK with watching my Mom’s beloved possessions go to new owners. This part of the process, though? The end part?  It has been rough. Maybe the reality of what we had to do didn’t hit me sooner because my favorite furniture pieces didn’t sell. I was secretly happy about that. Whenever I’ve dropped by her house recently, even after the sales, I could still toss my bag on the hutch and sit at the kitchen table. I could grab a soda from the refrigerator and imagine that my Mom had just stepped out to do errands, that she’d be back any minute to have a Diet Pepsi with me.

The kitchen table is one of the hardest pieces to let go; I’m surprised that nobody wanted it.  It’s solid oak and heavy. Mom rescued it from outside her church in Woodland Hills, years before they moved up North, even before I was born. It was out for the trash, but she took it home and refinished it.  It made the move up North and has been in the same place in the dining room for nearly 50 years. It was  where she and my Dad read the paper and had coffee. It was where we had thousands of family dinners, where I grew up and celebrated just about every birthday and where my sister brought her husband-to-be to meet everyone for the first time.  My parents played pinochle with my grandparents there. It’s where we ate my Grandma’s homemade pies.

In recent years, four generations gathered around that table.  It had two sections that could be added to make it bigger. I remember all the times I stood on one end of the table while my Mom stood on the other, and I pulled the rings, and we added the extra sections, then put on a tablecloth and brought out Aunt Gertrude’s fancy china (which was also leftover after the sales. Nobody wanted it either. Not even for free.)

And that couch in the living room? It’s where my Dad watched baseball. I sit there and know that I am exactly where he used to be.

The couch needs to go, though. So does the table. So do all the blankets and sheets and quilts, the pancake flippers, the iced tea maker, my Mom’s shoes and dresses and pants, the coffee mug that says Ken.  Yesterday, my niece posted photos of the table on the local Facebook yard sale site; we finally found a taker when the price was free.

I’m not sure how I am going to make it through this.

But here is a small thing that is helping me. I do not know if it is a dream, a vision, or maybe just a wish.  I believe it is a gift.  I see myself and my sister with my Mom and Dad. We are walking hand in hand, and I am in the middle. We are leaving the big house, the house where I grew up, the house where the table still sits, the house where my Mom died. We are going away, possibly on a trip, and we are not sad.  Nobody is worried about the house, or anything that is left there.  We pause and watch as a parade of stuff moves joyfully out of the house and finds new people, new life. We wave goodbye and walk down a different road, setting out on new adventures ourselves.   In the vision, I know that my Mom and Dad are still with me, that the stuff is just stuff, and they are OK with seeing it go. They are still holding me, and their love remains, even after everything else is gone.