my mother's apartment

Of course it's a grisly, rainy day today -- yesterday I got my wife's car washed.

And today, in a great piece of generosity, my wife and older son took off in a U-Haul van, bound for New York and picking up those items in my mother's former apartment that we might wish to keep. The trip and effort are outside my energy bomb zone.

Just what we don't need around this house -- more stuff -- and yet there is some compulsion to find it needful or sentimentally desirable or perhaps financially advantageous ... and even if it is none of that, to cope with it. Paintings, photos, papers, a bit of jewelry, a television, two vacuum cleaners ... and various other knicks and knacks. The only things I find myself vaguely drawn to are things I see as "beautiful."

The bureaucratic necessities of my mother's death seem to spurt like blood from a severed artery -- not all at once, but pump-pump-pumping in accordance with a still-beating heart.

And so, besides the physical items in the apartment where my mother lived, yesterday there were the papers necessary to relinquish that apartment to the property owner, a job that required scanning and signatures and ... left me confused even as I got them out out the door in a form that I hope will meet the management company's satisfaction ... an email and a hard copy. I hate paperwork, probably because I feel somehow overwhelmed by its tendrils. There is some ancient-habit compunction to be socially adroit, which is something that requires an energy I dislike mustering.

And then, with luck so to speak, later today there will be all that stuff to find room for around an already-overstuffed house when my wife and son return. No doubt it too will settle in and collect dust and be part of the overcrowded panorama, but looking forward to it ... bleah.