The Things We Leave Undone

writings from a year of grief

Photo by Lucia Sorrentino on Unsplash

This piece was written in March of 2022, as part of an “Essay Camp” with Summer Brennan. Reflecting on it now I see how deeply I was immersed in a river of grief from the year before, the “year that everyone died” as I sometimes think of it. I tend to agree with those who say there is no complete “closure” to grief (see Pauline Boss), it is a companion who will always be with us, in new and different ways. I’m currently at work on a memoir about that year and about the transformation and healing of my relationship with my mom and dad in the years that came before it.

“According to experts, the things that you leave undone can be your own undoing.”

- from a real estate flier, encouraging “decluttering” in preparation for selling a house

I became an expert on clutter by observing my parents over decades. They were hoarders par excellence, and clearly undone by their massive piles of stuff. I was undone by their un-doneness, for a long time having no idea how to intervene as the situation got progressively worse and more dangerous.

For many years I kept a big distance from my mom and dad, both physically and emotionally. In my early 20s I moved from California to New England in part to get as far away from them as I could. Both were well-meaning and did the best they could as parents, but they were quite psychologically underdeveloped, which manifested in their hoarding. I found it difficult to be around them.

The rare occasions I returned to visit were agonizing. Mice had the run of their house and rodent droppings were everywhere, the roof was falling apart, my dad would trip over massive piles of newspapers and books to make his way to his favorite threadbare chair. The most heartbreaking part was that my parents did not seem to think anything was amiss with this picture.

As I watched my mom and dad struggle even more in their older years, as I watched everything becoming undone and knowing there were no other siblings to help, I could no longer in good conscience keep up this distancing act. Gradually I re-engaged with them and tried to find a safe place for them to live, despite their fierce resistance to addressing what was going on. In addition to the spectacular amount of “stuff” that was crammed into their house, they had virtually no cash flow because of a large second mortgage and home equity line of credit from a number of years earlier. It was a perfect storm of difficult conditions—they were living at poverty level in squalid conditions.

In August 2019—after months of navigating the headwinds of my mom’s strong will and resistance, and their increasing physical and cognitive challenges—I brought them to live in my New Mexico hometown. Later that month I returned to their California home to clear it so it could be sold and pay off their debt. For seven solid days I worked with a crew of professional ‘de-clutterers’ to clear out the endless piles of every imaginable type of thing from the house. It was like an archaeological dig: magazines and newspapers from the 60s, 70s, and 80s; classical record albums; every restaurant take-out container they had ever ordered; every school paper I had ever written; petrified banana peels and mummified mouse carcasses.

By March of the following year the pandemic arrived and they were on lockdown inside their assisted living center in Santa Fe. In January of 2021, my mom and dad tested positive for COVID, a week before they were to be vaccinated. By the end of that month, they died within two weeks of each other. I returned one last time to their apartment to clear out the last of their belongings, the final remnants of clutter and treasures.

Dear dad,

I thought of maps today and that led me to think about you. How much you loved maps. I wish I had asked you that question while you were still alive: why do you love maps so much? Though knowing you, I probably would have gotten at most a three-word answer. But maybe everything was in those three words.

You had maps everywhere – in your car, at the dining room table, by your bedside. You’d spend long hours marking up routes for other to take, that was your job for many years at the Automobile Association of America office in downtown Los Angeles. You spent hours imagining where you could take mom and me on our annual road trips from Southern California to Ohio, where my grandparents lived. You planned one segment of a trip to go through the Kentucky bluegrass region and visit a thoroughbred farm because you knew how much I loved horses. Did I ever thank you? I am thanking you now. I feel like all I saw in your later years was pathology, how depressed you were, how emotionally unavailable. But you were also a great father when I was growing up. I am sorry I never said this to you, and I love you.

I’m sitting in a canyon at Arroyo Hondo, situated just below the road that connects Seton Village with the Las Vegas Highway, on the outskirts of Santa Fe. Every now and then when I look upwards to the top rim of the canyon, I see cars and trucks going up and down the road just beyond.

My dear friend Katya and I once shared a house on the other side of the hill. That was our home for a year, until the cold of the uninsulated walls and the crazy landlady became too much for us. The December night before we moved out of the house, there was a huge snowstorm. That same night, my dog Lucy got very sick, throwing up and having diarrhea all over my bedroom. It went on for a couple of hours and wasn’t stopping, and Lucy was very weak and confused. I had no idea what was wrong and was terribly worried about her. It was around 2 am, I looked outside where the snow was still coming down, at least a foot of it on the ground. I couldn’t imagine driving through that in my ancient Toyota Corolla to get to the emergency vet, about five miles away. I didn’t want to wake up Katya, who was sleeping in her bedroom on the second floor, but I knew I needed help. Lucy needed help.

After knocking on her door, apologizing for the late night disruption and telling her what was happening, Katya said, “Of course you should wake me up!” She put on her boots and went out to sweep the snow off her car and dig out enough of a path that she could drive through it to the road. Being the upstate New York native that she was, Katya steered us slowly and safely all the way down that snowy hill to the main highway to reach the emergency vet.

We got Lucy into the vet where she was treated for extreme digestive disruption and stayed the rest of the night for hydration and monitoring. The next day, after getting a critical mass of my belongings moved from the old place, I picked her up and brought her to my new home. That snowy trip saved her life. Katya saved her life.

Seven years later, Lucy is still happy and healthy. Katya is no longer with us, having died last fall after a seven-month journey with stage 4 cancer that metastasized to her brain, primary source unknown. Her death came seven and a half months after my mom and dad’s deaths.

“According to experts, the things that you leave undone can be your own undoing.”

Bosque—a word I learned when I moved to New Mexico 13 years ago. The bosque is the forest habitat alongside streams and rivers in the southwest. Cottonwood and mesquite trees, willows and olives, and much more grow in these verdant bands. On this mid-March day, much of the vegetation in the bosque along the Rio Grande is still bare. Huge cottonwood branches reach toward the deep blue sky, no green leaves yet. But we’ve turned the corner on winter and spring is nearly here. Very soon there will be signs of new life. I am so hungry to see that again after this inexorably long fall and winter after Katya’s death, and this first full year since my mom and dad died the winter before.

Feeling the tone and energy of today’s grief in my body: ungrounded, hollow, cutting. These jagged bare brown branches mirror what I am feeling. Every day, every moment, this grief has a different flavor, a different nuance. Some days the loss is sharp as a knife. Other days, the fullness of love and gratitude when I remember these three lost beloveds carries me along into new life. Those days are a relief.

This intimate relationship with impermanence leads me to look more closely at the things I’ve left undone and, as much as I can, to tend to their completion. I know I will not completely succeed. At the end of the day, at the end of my life, something will always be left undone. Meanwhile here in the bosque, life generates and dies away and rises up again. This cycle of doing, of undoing, goes on forever.

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