Jaci Dawn

The first thing I was struck with when I went home was the sense that Dad was not there. It wasn’t the empty feeling of losing him that I experienced, but the goose-bumpy-ghost-haunting lack of feeling: he was not there. He wasn’t haunting the house. Little shreds of his being were not hiding in the atmosphere. A palpable sense of someone who used to live there did not hang in the air. Dad was gone. Long gone.

We leave behind the memories but even those have no lasting effect on the atmosphere when the living soul is removed. Memories are held in the heart and in the dreams, a long and faulty video tape that runs in our heads when we close our eyes.

I felt only a vague sense of trespassing as we sorted through the contents of dressers, the basement, the two sheds, the garage and more. Sometimes a treasure presented itself (when I get everything home from Reno there will be more to share). Mostly, however, the dry sense that no one was watching, no one could protest and no one lived in those halls settled on us. In short, there was no sense at all except that of our memories.

I feel like I should write something profound. But like the ghost that did not haunt the house, the words that need to form are not there.

I am home. Life goes on. Dad’s birthday is on Saturday and that will be the first hurdle of grief beyond the tangible stuff of things left behind. I need to write my own will, have a yard sale to get rid of my own clutter (and make room for the new clutter coming in), work on genealogy and write thank-you notes, and I really really need to weed out my prayer garden this weekend. I need to have that stupid kidney stone removed.

Harvey and I need to go for a long walk here at home.

What did we leave behind? The memories? Terry and I grew up in a different house: the folks bought the house Dad died in after we left home. The memories were in the little memorabilia, not in the house or the yard.

We left behind walls stained with nicotine and tar. We left ugly wall paper and strange marbled linoleum on the floor in the kitchen. Dust in the crevices of the carpet and black widow spiders hunkered down in dark corners of the basement. We left mud dauber nests in the sheds. Old rocks embedded in the dirt. A set of Time-Life self help books. An old Winchester on the wall over the unused fireplace. Cordwood in the hearth and in the box outside under the picnic table. A moldy coffee pot. Mom’s treasured pyrex cooking set.

We left furniture, drawings, knick-knacks, dishes, tools, trunks. We left behind our nephew’s dead cars and broken bicycles, bags of trash and unrecycled recycles. We left behind a thirty-something nephew and a 13 year old niece. We left all of Chrystal’s inheritance because she thinks she will pack it all up here and move back to Nevada by September. We left behind the old green cinder-block house and the ugly indoor-outdoor carpet in the sun room.

We left behind so very much and yet we took our memories.

(OK, the last photo is real. It’s my dad’s political soap box. My favorite side of the soap box. He ran for Nevada State Senate – and lost. My mom drew her feet on the top of the box. What can I say??)

Until later…