Matching Tracksuits

I sit in my parents’ apartment listening to Mozart’s Requiem looking around I completely empty room what was once so full life. The couch, the table, the chairs, the media equipment, the paintings, the photographs, the bookshelves and books, the kitchen utensils — everything is gone, sold for next to nothing or dumped in the trash.

Sitting in this empty house is not the same as sitting in my own empty apartment just before moving out.  There’s more of finality about this. When you’re leaving your own apartment, you know you’re going to a new one. This apartment, we’re just leaving. Someone else will own it, someone else will live in it, someone else will bring new memories into it, and someone else will make new memories out of it. We, on the other hand, consolidated two houses into one with Papa moving in with us, so this is a period for us — an end stop. So many of the memories associated with this home have to do with our children. L playing and the castle that Nana and Papa bought for her when she was around four or five years old. E rolling around on the floor with Papa, rolling around on the floor with Lena, rolling around the floor with whomever who was willing.

But some of the memories are more difficult. Every time I walk down the hall to get something out of the back bedroom or take something to the laundry room — a paintbrush to clean perhaps or a search for something absorbent — I pass by the guest bathroom from which Nana was emerging when it all started. I see her there again on the floor with paramedics around her, with Papa distraught, all knowing the situation but not realizing the gravity of it all.

That was now a year ago. Early December it all started. A trip to the hospital, a return trip home, some physical therapy, a collapse again, back to the hospital, back for physical therapy, to the rehab hospital, back to the hospital, all of it creating an enormous circle that seemed endless but most certainly was not.