Many older adults live solo prior to requiring more care. Perhaps they were single to start with, or divorced or widowed. At one time or another every individual (or their adult child) faces the same challenge: what furniture to keep, what to gift and what to let go of for good.
Each act, the keeping, the gifting and the giving away are symbolic. They represent not only the attachments to a certain time in life, but also to people and to things that are valued (or aren't valued).
We are taught, theoretically, to release, to let go. There are buzz words: shedding, downsizing, sorting. But later in life it seems we want our parents to hold on...just a little...bit...longer. We know, intellectually, that's not always possible. Emotionally, however, we don't want to know anything of the sort.
When a parent has to move, it brings the issue front and center.
For some, moving into a smaller space--this was the case for my mother after my father died--comes with little resistance. From the home she'd shared with my father (the only move she planned) to a smaller house, to an even smaller one, to an assisted living apartment, to a board and care home and, finally, to a nursing home--she seemed ready to leave.
During the earlier moves she took an interest in her surroundings, in decorating. Toward the end, she had less of an interest in her environment. I see now, even long before her death, this was because she was dying. More of her time was spent in her internal environment--meaning inside herself. As a healthcare professional, this made perfect sense. But as a daughter, it was hard to understand and accept that she was in the process of letting go.
This made me realize that many of the aesthetic changes I or my siblings might have wanted to make in our mother's environment later in life, when she clearly didn't care either way, were more for our own emotional comfort and ease. At the same time, my mother was happy to give away her belongings. While there was a part of me that loved receiving things, there was a part of me that couldn't--or wouldn't--process that she wasn't giving these items to me as she used to give me things even a decade earlier--to watch me enjoy them. No. She was gifting because she was ready to unload, to release, to pass things on. To leave the earth.
Realizing that alone was, in and of itself, my own personal "a-ha! moment." It was startlingly clear. I can't say I was ready for it, but there it was, ready for me.
