Chapter 8 - jan 2010 - reclaiming bedroom

©2011 Tom Weathers

I am not sure that she believed she would really die. Her stuff was a wall keeping death on the outside.

For much of the year I either worked on the house or thought about working on the house. During the last years of Brenda’s illness we let a lot slide – allowing clutter to accumulate and ignoring all but the most pressing repairs. After Brenda died I thought I would feel better if I fixed things up.

The first project was the front bedroom. It had been Yancie’s old room. After Yancie got married and moved out Brenda started using the room as her office – although we still called it Yancie’s room. My employer, Network Controls was getting rid of unneeded furniture so I moved one of their old Steel Case desks at the end of the room in front of a window. I also got a small computer table and a two drawer file cabinet. Brenda transferred her papers and records. I bought a new laptop for myself and gave her the old desktop, setting up an internet connection – at first a dial up then after we got RoadRunner a wireless link.

(Although she liked email and internet searches, Brenda was never comfortable with computers. Things seemed to happen to her. I can hear her voice now from Yancie’s room crying, “Tommy”. I knew that something had happened with the computer, something inexplicable. I would go in; she would be waiting for me. First we would argue about the inevitable cigarette smoldering in the ashtray. She would regard my request to have it extinguished as unnecessary, picky. She would say, “Hmph.” Then she would attempt to explain what had happened. But by this time I would be annoyed and she would be nervous, not telling me things I wanted to know and telling me things that I deemed as unimportant. Generally I fixed the problem by rebooting the machine. All this could have been easily avoided by getting her a new machine, one without the quirks of the old hand-me-down system. I offered but she said that it wasn’t worth the expense, even though she could have afforded a new computer. Perhaps the fights and confrontations were their own rewards.)

After she died and I started to rummage through the stuff, I had to decide what to keep, what to get rid of. She never intended to discard anything. Little hand written notes were everywhere explaining the significance of this piece of paper, this object.

Were the notes for me – later - or for her? Did she think this would all go on forever?

Sometimes I cried. Sometimes not. Often Pye, the indoor cat joined me, sitting in a corner out of the way. She usually purred and did not cry. It is hard to get inside a cat’s head.

To avoid getting bogged down deciding what to keep what to dump, I came up with the notion of interim storage boxes. Papers and objects that I (or Yancie) might ultimately want to save went into interim boxes. These boxes went to her bedroom – and are still there subject to final disposition.

Ultimately I ended up with fairly empty room. The steel case desk was pulled put to the curb to be hauled away by a welcome scavenger. Using a rusty old butcher knife and a small crow bar I pulled up loose wall to wall carpeting and dragged it also to the edge of the yard. I did it all on my own. Every task was almost more than I could handle. If the desk had weighed 25 more pounds I would not have been able to get out of the house. I dismembered the carpet into manageable chunks.

In end, I moved my chest from the other bedroom and got a new mattress for Yancie’s old bed which became my old bed.

I thought it would make a difference.