Respect and Old Age

My mother’s lived in her house since 1972, and the people across the street were there before her. They were a sweet couple of teetotallers, he a Methodist minister, she the cookie-baking minister’s wife. He died five years ago. She’d been doing well, but fell a couple of months ago and landed in a nursing home. Bang zoom: her kids put the house on the market, moved their mom to a facility in the mid-West, held a tag sale, and filled up a dumpster with the detritus of two lives.

It’s so sad.

The tag sale was yesterday. It was run by a hostile incompetent hired gun – the place was a mess and the stuff was priced completely erratically and mostly unmarked (so you had to ask, whereupon she made up a price on the spot). You’d think that someone running a tag sale, working on commission, would want to maximize the income by keeping things presentable, by clearly pricing everything, by acting knowledgeable and helpful. In this case, you would be wrong.

There were still spices in the kitchen cabinets and Q-tips in the bathroom. For all I know, they were for sale. There were clothes in the closets and piles of linens on the floor. There was no order to anything.

My mother and I wandered around – I found a handmade double wedding ring quilt in a heap upstairs, and asked how much. $5, said the hostile incompetent. So I bought a quilt for $5 – I don’t need it, but I couldn’t walk away from it. There was a handsome mirror in the dining room – my mother said she’d been asking $400 at the pre-sale earlier in the week. By yesterday, the price was down to $75. I went back at the end of the day and offered $20. She countered with $30. I left. About 10 minutes later, my husband showed up – I sent him across the street, and he came back with the mirror for $25. And my mother went over and came home with a little upholstered rocker for free – earlier, the hostile incompetent had been asking $60. So erratic.

Once the tag sale was over, they starting heaving things into a dumpster. Plaques given to the minister. Antique clock parts (his hobby was clock repair). Dishes. Books. Christmas ornaments. Napkins. Space heaters.

It’s so disrespectful.

It’s so wasteful.

My brother and sister and their spouses and a family friend and a neighbor headed across the street after dark and, wine-fueled, dove into the dumpster with flashlights.

It seemed right to rescue some bits of their life. A pressed glass citrus reamer. A crochet hook. A pinecone-shaped iron cuckoo clock weight. A Horatio Alger book.

It could have been done so much better. They could have found a way to let her stay in the house. They could have found her a place to live in the area - where she has friends and neighbors and acquaintances and church folk - instead of shipping her off to the middle of the country where she'll know no one but her dead husband's elderly brother. They could have hired a more sensitive person to run the tag sale. They could have been more respectful of her stuff, her life, her things, his life, his hobbies, their life. They could have packed off much of the stuff to thrift shops, to shelters, to people to whom the stuff would have made a difference. A space heater tossed in a dumpster does no one any good. A box fan...the same.

It sounds like I'm blaming her children - and in part I am. But it's also our society. We think nothing of discarding things and people, we disrespect the past. In that is our curse for the future. It's environmental. It's societal. It's human. We should do better.