Unfinished

I've been watching those Hoarder shows lately. People living in mass chaos, overwhelming clutter, to say the least. Piles everywhere. Whole rooms, levels, even, unusable. I watched one episode last night about a hoarding couple. Their dining room table was literally lost under a pile of stuff. From floor to ceiling, in every room, there were mounds of trinkets, boxes, clothes. Paths had been forged from room to room. This couple was addicted to shopping at thrift stores, and loved the hunt for a bargain. At the Salvation Army the wife saw an overstuffed arm chair marked half price, $30, and brought her husband over to take a look. "I thought it would make a nice accent piece for the living room," she said. They bought it. (Editor's note: my furniture-impaired husband didn't see the irony here and felt that I should explain. An accent piece, for a room that is buried in several feet of junk, has to be ironic, right?)

I watch these shows with feelings of judgment and superiority. I certainly feel better about myself and my house compared to those on Hoarders: Buried Alive. But every once in a while I can actually relate. This woman, with her ugly chair that, quite literally, won't fit into her living room, had a vision, a plan. She knew what she wanted her house to look like. When she is out shopping, away from the piles and the clutter, she sees something that will bring her closer to that vision. I found it so interesting, endearing, actually, that after twenty-odd years of living in her house, filling it (to the brim) with "treasures," she still soldiered on in the belief that someday she would have the home of her dreams. But things got in her way. Life and kids and addictions and, in her case, actual things.

I can identify with that. I'm good at getting an idea and starting the process. But when it takes longer than expected, or there are bumps along the way, I lose interest. Actually, it's not that I lose interest, it's more like I lose momentum. So, like this lady who, in amongst (I love that word) all her stuff, has over 50 beautiful painted plates she had once intended to hang on her walls, I have empty picture frames hanging on mine. Now, my wall has only looked like this for a few weeks, but the task has become bigger than I intended. I found all the frames right away, but when I opened them up, a couple were missing the hanging thingies and when I took them back the store was out of the sizes I need. A couple more fell off the wall because I was too hasty in hanging them and hadn't anchored them correctly. Still haven't. Then, finding the right pictures, vertical and horizontal, isn't as easy as I thought it would be. Trying to decide which pictures should be blown up to 14 x 11 is really scary! It had better be a darn good picture to be that big and hanging in my family room where I have to look at it all day. So instead, all day, I look at paper taped to my wall with blank and missing picture frames. While it's not 7-foot piles of gum wrappers and old phone books, it's still an eyesore and not the look I had in mind.

But, I've stopped seeing it. When I first found the template sheets and taped them to my wall, I was gung ho getting the project underway. I went right back to the store, bought the frames and couldn't get them hung up fast enough. But now that I've hit a few glitches and my picture wall is at a standstill, I will go for days without even thinking about it. I spend easily 75% of my day in the kitchen/family room part of my house and yet I somehow stopped noticing the empty and missing frames staring me in the face.

That is, until I'm having people over. Then I start seeing my house through the eyes of the visitor. I like for people to come into my home and feel welcome, feel like they can relax, and feel like Sara must really have it all together. My picture wall is not sending that message right now (along with my stained carpet, but that's for another post). I use the act of inviting people over as my kick-in-the-butt to get the house cleaned and projects done.

I don't mean to make light of hoarding. I do realize that it's an illness and something far deeper than just being messy. But I can't help but notice that all of the hoarders I have seen have one thing in common; they have stopped having anyone come into their house. I wonder if, like the paper template I have stopped seeing taped to my wall, a hoarder stops seeing the mess. And because they, at some point along the way, decided not to allow others to come past their front door, they never have to see it through an outsider's eyes. If I stopped having people over, who knows what my house would look like!

So, last night while I lounged on my couch watching Hoarders and judging with no abandon, my less-than-half completed picture wall loomed above me. On the other hand, if I've learned anything from watching these shows, it's that the answer to my picture problem is not more picture frames.

Silence

So, I read a thing lately that said writer's block is not about anything being blocked, but about having nothing to say. I beg to differ. At least for me, lately, it hasn't been about having nothing to say, but about not knowing how to say it. Up until recently I was able to get an idea, sit down at my computer, and fifteen minutes later have a post written and ready to publish. You may or may not have noticed, but for the last month or so I haven't posted anything. Here's why.

Three weeks and one day ago, my father-in-law passed away. I wasn't sure if I was ready to, or if I even wanted to, write about it, but anything else that popped into my head seemed pointless in comparison. I had ideas, and still have several posts started and saved; one paragraph, maybe two and then blank space. One is about not doing things I don't want to do, but as I was writing that I realized that we ALL have to do things we don't want to do; like watch people we love make unhealthy choices that will ultimately lead to their early death.

Another is about how I love looking out my window at the trees in my backyard, but that before I know it winter will be here and the green leaves will be gone . Winter, and the thought of things dying made me sad.

I started one about Lily taking her first steps. Do you remember the commercial about the grandpa? He's sitting in a chair as his (presumed) daughter and grandson enter the room. The little boy is toddling along, clearly just learning to walk. The grandfather gets down on his knees to catch the boy, but then he disappears and the grandson walks right through him. The mom says "I wish grandpa was here to see this..." I'm living that commercial right now.

My father-in-law, Don, and I weren't especially close; he was a really quiet guy. But I know that he loved me. He would never have said those words, at least to me, but he did little things to show me. Once he took my car in to get the oil changed without telling me. It would have been a wonderful surprise, only he locked my keys in the car and had to call me for the spare set. He was embarrassed. I hope he believed me when I told him how thankful I was that he would even think to do something like that for me.

When I met my in-laws, over ten years ago, neither of them smoked. They had while Wade was growing up, but after Don's mother passed away from lung cancer in 1995 they both quit. Then suddenly, when I was pregnant with Sophie, their first grandchild, both of them started smoking again. Cheryl quit for good soon after, but Don didn't. For a long time I was angry that he had stopped for so long, seven years, but started up again just as he was becoming a grandfather. He tried to hide it from us, and he never smoked around our kids, but it bothered me nonetheless that he was making that choice, risking his health. He was no dummy. He knew what smoking would do to his body. We talked to him about quitting. Every once in a while he would say that he would, but he never did. We stopped asking. We decided to focus on the quality, rather than the quantity, of time we had left with him. Not knowing, of course, how little time there was.

We've had a few of those middle-of-the-night-phone-calls everyone dreads over the last few years. My mother-in-law has had trouble breathing and when the phone rings at 1:00am it's usually to let us know that she has been taken to the hospital. So when the phone rang early in the morning on August 1st we assumed she was back in the hospital. But this time it was Wade's mom on the line. Don was being admitted for stomach pain. They were talking about doing surgery later that day. She said she would call us again when she knew more. A few hours later Wade got up and drove the hour-and-a-half to spend the day with his parents. A CT scan reveled nothing seemingly wrong with Don's stomach, but showed a large mass on his right lung. Another CT scan on Monday, when both Wade and I were there, gave a clearer picture. Don's right lung was almost completely shut down. His left lung was filling with fluid. Tuesday the doctors said it was time to talk about hospice and nursing homes. They said less than six months. A meeting was scheduled for Wednesday morning, where the doctors, Cheryl and Wade would present the plan to Don. By the time Wade got down there Wednesday morning the meeting had been canceled. His dad wouldn't last the day.

We're grateful, on the one hand, that he went quickly. It's what he wanted. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and, looking back, we can see how sick he had been. And for quite some time. He had watched his mother suffer, in and out of the hospital; in and out of pain. I believe he never said a word about his own suffering in part to avoid the hospital, but also to save us the pain of watching his decline. Wade made a comment a few days after his father had passed away that will stick with me. He said that he can see now that his dad was fighting death every day. So, I'm glad that it's not a struggle anymore. I'm relieved that he's no longer sick, no longer smoking, finally at peace.

But for those of us still here, there's a void where he is supposed to be. It happened so fast that it didn't seem real. Doesn't seem possible. I'll be looking at a picture of him and it will suddenly hit me that he's not here anymore. It honestly catches me by surprise every time. He was so quiet in life that at times it was easy to forget he was there. Now that he's not, his silence is deafening.

It's an incredible story, actually. Thanks for letting me share it with you.