Christmas Closet

When I was home this past December, my stepmother assigned me the task of helping my dad go through and get rid of stuff in the closet of his office. When I think back to everything that happened during that vacation, the trips that I took, friends I saw, conversations I had or tried to have, my happiest thoughts are of time spent on that bloody closet.

My father's intellectual capacities seem to be declining quickly. I already knew that he could no longer remember phone conversations the that we have or even that they had happened after the fact. I was unprepared for just how much the present moment escapes him. Maybe it is not that the actual present moment escapes him. Rather, it is that he continues to exist almost solely in the present moment and has trouble remembering the ones just past.

Either way, conversations about anything but the distant past seemed to move at a glacial speed, if at all. Ask him what he was doing when President Roosevelt died and out comes a great story. Ask him what he had for dinner or just ordered at a restaurant and he has no idea.

It is with this in mind, that we ventured into his office. In addition to separating things for goodwill, one of the major jobs was to find and shred old financial documents. Once upon a time in the not too distant past, my father had a fair number of investments. In the process of his decline, he lost a lot of money. We don't know where it all went, but by the time we realized how bad things had gotten and my stepmother finally took over his finances a great deal had been lost to shady brokers, market declines, charities, political causes, vitamin salesmen, mail order smoked salmon and God knows what else. What was left to be gotten rid of were folders, binders and old cardboard boxes full of a paper trail of now lost wealth.

On days that I was home, the scene was set with myself alternately poking about in the closet and sitting on the floor shredding. My dad would sit in a chair slowly reading through a box of old class notes. The shredder served as a rallying cry to my father. He would hear it and then come to the office to make sure that I wasn't destroying something important. Invariably he would ask me if I had brought the machine with me. I would tell him that it belonged to his wife, and he would settle into the chair to continue his slow sifting through notes and newspaper clippings.

There were some exciting finds in the labyrinthine closet. My favorite was a letter that he had written to his Aunt Mildred in 1960 when Kennedy was elected. There was also a great stash of forgotten food stuffs buried throughout the closet. I removed 3 expired tins of fish, 4 cans of soup, an expired jar of peanut butter, a box of instant mashed potatoes and a bag of potato chips, mercifully unopened. There was also a 6" X 12" filled entirely with return address labels and other thank you gifts from charities including six unopened American flags.

In the recycled envelopes with tax returns from the 1980's and canceled checks, I found record of a loan that my mother took on after the divorce. My father had cosigned. I also found a three ring binder detailing his father's slow decline from Alzheimer's. I could only read as far as the first letter from my uncle describing some of his symptoms and the infamous incident when he disappeared into the woods in Wisconsin, which resulted in a massive search with a local team and dogs. This was the end of my grandfather's summers in Wisconsin, one of the few places he remembered.

Amongst the recyclables were incredible stacks of investment and health magazines. At one time organized into labeled binders, all of them had my father's tell tale underlining throughout to show that he had read them and what he had found important or useful. I threw these magazines out with relish just as I shredded the record of the loan, I shredded the history of my father's obsessions: investment and avoiding his father's fate through living a better life. Anyone could see how futile both of those exercises turned out to be.

In the days that I worked and thinned out the closet, I got rid of a box of unused candles, bags of clothing, 4 trash bags of shredded papers and a few carloads of recycling. My dad got through about 1 box of old class notes. I kept asking him if he thought he would use it again. He would say, "Oh, I guess not." Then he would part with a few sheets of paper but decide to keep some others. At one point, I asked him what he was reading. He said is was an article about Nixon, but really it was about Bush II.

Somehow, even with the emotional baggage of so much that I was finding, this was a happy time for me. We were doing something together. We barely spoke, but it was alright. We've always been quiet, except for talking about political things or family gossip. This is just how we both are; sometimes socially inhibited but with a lot of pent up passion that spills forth into the things we really care about. We both like to putter, read and run. We enjoy planting things and looking at trees. Though not easily aroused, we both have volcanic tempers but love very deeply and loyally. These things seem to be the essence of my father, and I am sorry that it has taken his stripping bear, his slow deconstruction for me to realize just who he really is underneath all that he had seemed to be for so long.