I have chosen May 25 as moving day.
There have been several things happening lately, with both me and
with Ed, which have made it blatantly clear that we aren't doing this any too soon.
I am confident (hopeful?) that once she is in her new apartment without being surrounded
by clutter and the chaos of moving plans she will improve a bit. There is no way
that she is going to get back the memory that she has lost, but with fewer things to think
about, I'm hoping that it won't seem quite so bad for her.
We are gathering the troops for moving day. Ned and Marta will
be there, Tom and Laurel will be there, and Ed is contacting his kids who live in the area
to help as well. Jeri will be there the days before, which will be a tremendous help
in getting things packed. I figure one day to visit with grandma, one day to bring
her to Davis and look at the apartment with an eye for what is going where, and one day
for me to join them and pack more stuff (possibly taking it to Davis with me on return),
and then she flies back to Boston.
Today Ed took her to the bank and got lots of banking issues
straightened out and arranged for when she moves. I don't know what I'd do without
Ed taking over all the money business! He's a godsend.
In the afternoon, I brought lunch down and started making plans for
moving. At Ed's suggestion, I brought some colored labels to put on all the things
that are going and my plan was to get her into the mindset of going through the house,
room by room, and marking the things that go. Whatever is not going will be
things that she shouldn't have to worry about.
We spent a couple of hours doing that during which time I discovered,
to my delight, that most of the drawers in several cupboards and dressers that I
thought were going to have to be carefully sorted through contain things she won't be
taking anyway, like greetings cards, and photos she says she's not interested in any more,
wrapping paper, and just stuff. Easy peasy, I thought.
I even put labels on the few things that had been spoken for.
Like there is a clock Jeri wants so I put a "Jeri" label on it, and a
"Tom" label on the dish cabinet (good thing, since my mother didn't remember he
and Laurel wanted the dishes), as well as a label on a shelf of some dishes I am going to
be taking.
We actually went through 3 rooms, looking in every drawer, tagging
things that go and then we sat down and I reminded her that we had finished three whole
rooms and she didn't have to worry about them any more. But she looked at me and
said "yes, but YOU looked at them; I didn't. I need to go through each drawer
myself" (which I thought she had already done!)
Sigh.
So I left her a bunch of labels, hoping to simplify things for her.
I put big Xs on each of the labels and told her that once she had gone through a
drawer and had taken out the things she wanted to bring with her, she should put a label
on it so she knew she didn't have to worry about that label again.
I left the labels on the kitchen counter and as I was leaving, she
picked them up and said "what are these for?" Sigh. She probably
won't go through any drawers at all.
I did take down the magnets on half of her fridge. I took a
picture of the fridge doors and tomorrow I hope to go to Covell Gardens, pick up her key,
and put the magnets on her new fridge in the same configuration that they are now.
She is still torn about her huge dining room table. She is sad
that nobody in the family has expressed a desire for it. It's a huge round table
that can seat 6 people without needing leaves put in it (it has been featured in many
cousins day "toast" photos). Her husband insisted on buying it because it
was "solid oak" and good quality, even though it was $500 (and weighs a
ton). She is fixated on paying $500 for that damn table. I keep telling her
that yes, she can take the table, if she absolutely can't live without it, but
there will be no room for any chairs and that she will have to squeeze around the table if
she wants to go to the bathroom and that she can't have dinner parties in her apartment
anyway because they won't let her have a stove or a microwave because of her "mental
impairment" diagnosis. I have talked her out of taking the table, but she
insists there must be someone in either our family or Ed's family that can use
that table because it's solid oak, you know, and it cost Fred $500!
In fact, we were sitting down and talking about moving to Davis.
Only I guesss I was talking about moving to Davis and thought she was
listening to me just because she was watching me as I talked. I was telling her
about pretty places she could walk and how I could take a walker so that when she
needed to sit, she could sit in the chair part f the walker. I talked about nice
restaurants I could take her for lunch. I told her about the shows that the Davis Musical
Theater does and how they were the kinds of shows she would like and when the new season
started, I would take her to some of the shows.
She looked at me and said "You know, Fred paid $500 for that
table. It's solid oak. It's a shame that nobody in the family wants to take
it."
Sigh.
2 more weeks.
2 more weeks.
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