Boundaries

It was an interesting Thanksgiving.

Just a couple of months ago Brian's grandfather died, having fought that terrible disease, Alzheimer's. Brian's grandmother is in bad physical shape herself, and the couple hadn't lived in their home in several months. Ella, B's grandma, is in a full time care facility now, and will never return to her home. She can't go to the bathroom unassisted, and is clearly confused at times. She can't walk. There's just no other way around it.

For several months the somewhat painful conversations about who would get what have transpired. This was not new territory -- Ella is one of those elderly people who has been announcing her impending death for YEARS, and who has tried to die on us several times now. Perhaps this explains why I've heard her parceling out their stuff on more than one occasion over the past decade, long before she and Rathel (gpa) grew so ill. She has a knack for fatalism.

But it was new territory this past weekend in the sense that stuff was actually leaving their house; her words were coming true. Brian and I were long ago told that we could have a deep freeze, which is a great gift for our very hungry family that likes frozen stuff from Costco. It also made us look like the Beverly Hilbillies as we took it home, driving three hours with a trailer and a big upright fridge strapped to the back of our Suburban. To top off the image, we also had a healthy stack of firewood on board, and our suitcases, so if we'd just had the rocking chair and a corn cob pipe we could have headed straight for Hollywood.

But humor aside, and back to Rathel and Ella's house, we were told to take a peek to see if there was anything that we wanted from the house. I was very pleased to recieve the stuff that I did -- some crocheting supplies, lots of kitchen implements that I didn't have. But there was something kind of creepy about it all, like a boundary transgressed, that we were taking stuff from a home whose inhabitant was not gone -- just displaced. For a moment it felt like theft.

In her more rational days Ella would certainly have *wanted* her family to take and use her things-- she was a child of the depression in the most literal sense, and I imagine that it would have driven her nuts to think of good things going unused. But I understood what Brian's parents later said almost implicitly-- that we shouldn't mention to her that we've taken stuff from the house when we visited her at the nursing home -- because I had had something of that same sense myself.

In fact, I felt like I had pushed the limits of the boundary earlier at her home, when my cat-like curiosity brought me to look in their bedroom, where I found in a dresser drawer a really cool, *hilarious* handkerchief that listed pictures and calorie content of many common foods. Clearly never having been used, it was a crisp little square stuffed under some jewelry boxes. It looked as if it had never seen daylight. But when I rounded the corner and arrived at their closet, something sort of, well, spooky, came over me. Perhaps it was that the closet light didn't work. But I think it was more that clothes, garments, *bedrooms*, are so personal. Shoes lay in the floor where their wearer had last kicked them off. The garments hung sadly on hangers, looking not unlike how they do now on elderly frames. It would not be too dramatic to say that I felt like I was violating something. Had everything been neat and tidy, perhaps I wouldn't have been so bothered. But the house was lived in; it was inhabited by real people. And this was their stuff.

So I am the new owner today of a hefty set of kitchen items, which is great. And did I mention how great the deep freeze is? Freezalicious! But I also have a handkerchief that I was told to take, which apparently everyone thinks has no sentimental value to anyone. Strangely, though, it doesn't seem as funny as it did before.