[elder home clearing / politics]
Saturday I flew to the Bay Area to help with clearing out my in-laws’ condo. Kevin’s dad passed two years ago, and Kev’s mom had cleared out most of Ron’s things, and dealt with a lot of the financial / legal matters, but she developed lung cancer unexpectedly, and passed shockingly quickly, and wasn’t able to sort everything out as well as she would have liked.
Ann was tremendously detail-oriented; she kept daily logs of everything she’d done for decades, and she kept every piece of legal / financial paper, I think. She was a lawyer (though she took a break for a while to raise her two children), and I suspect ‘keep everything’ was part of that training / mindset…
Kev had already done a first pass on the papers last time he was out there, and tried to figure out what we needed to keep, what should be shredded, and what could be recycled. He didn’t quite finish, though, and we’ve all been very busy (and grieving), and the condo has been sitting empty for some months, because none of us had the time, energy, or emotional wherewithal to deal with it. Kevin’s sister Susan is local, but she has a very busy schedule.
I finally have a slightly more open schedule (with the Shops closed until May), so I volunteered to go out and help Susan find homes for all of their furniture, get the art appraised (they bought a lot of paintings, mostly at local art shows, probably not worth money, but we should check), and clear out as much as I could of the kitchen, living room, two bathrooms, two bedrooms, and closets.
Saturday was the long flight — Dan Percival met me at the San Francisco airport and drove me down to Los Gatos — we hadn’t seen each other in at least a year, so we took the time to have a nice catch-up, which was lovely. After he left, I spent a little while just assessing the situation, starting to make a plan of attack. But I was pretty tired (and two hours later by body clock), so I didn’t really DO much of anything that day.
My college friend Shannon John Clark lives in the area, and came over for a nice catch-up dinner at Thai Spice (my go-to comfort food in Los Gatos).
Both of us are married to non-seafood-eating people, so we were happy to get the fried soft-shell crab appetizer (more of a salad than I expected, but with yummy crab — I think this would make a good light lunch, if you chopped up the crab and tossed it with the salad and the spicy-sweet dressing). Then some pad siew (should’ve asked for it spicy, but they did bring us some hot sauce when asked), and a quite yummy green curry prawn. Lots of food, because I figured I’d eat it for leftovers the next day so I didn’t have to worry about leaving the apartment. Then Shannon ran me by the grocery store so I could get a few staples to tide me over (tea, milk, bananas, clementines, chocolate chip cookies), and I came back and crashed.
I’ve been thinking a lot of about community this weekend. Ron and Ann were SO invested in their community, always willing to take an extra step to help someone out. The best people.
Coming out to do this work is some effort for me, but it’s much easier for me than it is for Kevin or Susan — I was very fond of my in-laws, but it’s just not the same as when it’s your own parents. I’d get a little teary on occasion while working, coming across a sentimental item or photo, but I wasn’t drowning in grief.
There’s something that’s worth considering — just because you’re the person expected to do the job, doesn’t mean you’re the person best equipped to do the job. Maybe someone else will have a much easier time with it. It’s okay to tag them in.
And then all through the weekend, I had friends coming by. Some of them came to help, much appreciated; some just came to hang out and chat for a few hours, which was also very helpful — it let me have a good excuse to take a break from physical labor (lots of hauling boxes and furniture), resting enough that I could go back to the work recharged. I was tired at the end of each day, which is to be expected, but I wasn’t exhausted. Thinking about the value of friends, and of taking breaks.
Even on the plane, I was thinking about how community manifests in the simplest of ways. I had a middle seat, on a five hour flight. All of us had to use the restroom at some point. I don’t think I actually said two words to either man flanking me. But with gestures and patience, we did that little dance that indicated we had to get up, and we gracefully made space, and then again on the return, and we were even able to coordinate so I and the window seat guy went at about the same time, so the minimum of disruption all around.
And no one was happy about being in a cramped space and needing to do that dance, but everyone was polite and kind and did their best to reduce aggravation for everyone around.
Humans are at the worst when they’re frightened, I think; they act out of fear of loss. It can be so disheartening, hearing terrible things said by people you’d thought better of. But I want to lean into my awareness of the small kindnesses too, the casual generosity that lets you make someone else’s life easier, at very little cost to your own.
Questions for the next four years:
What’s easy for me to do, that might be helpful?
What’s going to have the most reach?
What are my strengths? (It turns out I am VERY good at winnowing and organizing a condo clean-out, which I guess didn’t really surprise me, but I hadn’t thought of it as a skill before.)


