The mourning starts early

My parents finally succeeded in selling our ancestral home, which used to be their primary residence in the Northeast. This was wrenching when it happened -- another piece of my youth gone -- but financially necessary, and quite a load off Dad's mind.

They collapsed their stuff into my house, which was just as wrenching, as there are now bits of pieces of their lives spilling into all my empty spaces. (I despise clutter. I don't like stuff; I keep very, very few things for sentimental reasons; I don't do storage. More on this draconian and, I realize, bizarre policy later.)

Some spaces were just too full, and my dad asked me to help my mom weed out about a third of her clothing, much of which was faded, stained, or out of date.

Now. While I enjoy cleaning out a closet as much as just about anything else in life (out with the old, in with the new!), this time, it felt uncomfortably like the post-funeral dispensing of the deceased's items that my family ritually endures. I don't know how your family does it, but in mine, almost everything is handed over to someone else, even shoes -- my Aunt June had about a dozen spectacular leather stilletos in every color of a peacock's tail.

First, the thought of pudgy Aunt June, whom I remember as perenially wearing polyester shorts and stretchy cotton houseslippers, squeezing her feet into these roach-crushers was rather bizarre. That fox stole over there, the veiled pillbox hat -- are we talking about the same person? Plus, I was too freaked out by her death, the careful display of a dead person's shoes -- "Take what you want!" -- and too young, at 12, to appreciate their beauty. But I regret to this day not taking the robin's-egg blue pair.

My mother didn't like the sorting and purging, either; not one bit. To her, I imagine it represented yet more intrusion into her choices and her life. We're her family and she loves us, but let's face it -- she's now basically under our control. And there really wasn't enough room in the closet for 20 years of accumulated clothing.

Plus, many of the clothes were too small due to her illness-related sugar addiction. We're vain ladies who are into clothes, so this stung. I tried to inject some humor by laughing at the padded shoulders we wore in the '80s -- nothing doing. She was particularly mute and withdrawn that day.

At the end of the ordeal, I suggested that we go upstairs to clip and paint her nails, as she's been having difficulty handling this herself . She snapped, "Leave me alone." I was actually glad to see her show some emotion, any emotion; while sad at the same time to be the instrument of her despair, and to be anticipating doing this again, alone, maybe in as soon as a few years.

I imagine this scenario isn't much different for others who have loved ones with a terminal diagnosis, but for FLD patients it just seems to start much earlier. They're still with us, and yet, not.