31 Days of 5 Minute Prompts: Day Eleven — REMEMBER

Do you see all that stuff up there? We put it out on the curb about six weeks ago, relieved to have our garage looking neater, waiting for the local thrift shop to pick it up on their rounds through our neighborhood.

I must admit that I still get misty-eyed when I look at this picture. These were my mama’s things, you see. I had sorted them soon after she died in April. I put a few things in my house, let my daughters and my niece look through them to see if there was anything they wanted, and then I bagged up all that was left. It all sat there until about the middle of September.

It felt odd to see her life reduced to a curb full of leftovers, but that’s what happens to us all, isn’t it? Every time we moved her, life got smaller. From their retirement home to a retirement community. From their shared 2-bedroom to her 1-bedroom. From there to assisted living across the street, and from that place, 100 miles up the coast to a dementia unit near us. Last of all, there was that hard, hard day when she and I slowly walked down the long hall from her lovely 1-room home for the past 4 years into the skilled nursing facility to which that unit was attached. “You are hastening my death,” she moaned to me — the first sensible sentence she had uttered in months, at least the first one that wasn’t a part of her increasingly limited ‘script.’

And her words devastated me.

They proved to be prophetic. She was gone two months and two weeks later.