just enough light

I decided that Saturday was the day to put Dad’s bedroom furniture in the front yard with a price tag on it. He died 5 months ago. It seemed that every week during that 5 months involved closing out or finalizing some part of his life; terminating utilities and his phone plan, closing out his credit card account and his bank account, cancelling subscriptions and email, that sort of thing. All the while, his bedroom furniture had been sitting in my shed out back, taking up storage space and mental space. Of course, there are still boxes of photo albums and miscellaneous stuff, but I can live with that. I can deal with those later. The bedroom furniture was another thing. The bed, dresser, chest, and night stands were the last of his large, tangible possessions.

So early that morning Judy and I hauled it all out to the front yard, assembled the bed, arranged it all to be visible to those driving by, and then prepared to spend the day telling people, “We’ll sell it by the piece later today if you want to come back. For this morning, it goes as a set.” It was important to me to try to sell it as a set. Not only would it make my life easier, but I also had a voice in my head saying, “These pieces have spent every night together for the last 60 years. Don’t separate them now.”

I don’t know when my parents bought the bedroom set, but it’s the only one I remember. My guess it was when I was 10 or 12 years old. It was beautiful, dark mahogany, French Provincial. The four-poster bed had ornate posts with finials at each corner. It’s what I now call “Little old lady” furniture, but when it was new, it was beautiful and classy, just like my mother, who I’m sure was completely responsible for its selection. My dad had no sense of taste and had never had two pieces of matching furniture in his life. She, on the other hand, had grown up with fine furniture and was, I’m sure, proud of this purchase.

So there it was, furniture on the lawn. I stepped back, folded my arms, and looked at our placement. Before I could put a sign up with a price, someone drove up in a pickup truck, talked with Judy and me, and bought the whole lot. Done. Within 30 minutes they had picked it up in two loads and the yard was empty.

It happened too fast. I didn’t get to tell them much about the furniture, about the people who had used it for 6 decades, but of course, they didn’t care. Or more accurately, they cared about things other than that. They were going to paint and resell it, or repurpose it in some way. The history was irrelevant to them. It only mattered to me.

That’s been one of the lessons of my dad’s death. He lived a long and meaningful life. He spent 75 years doing what he believed God called him to do, preaching. He had not detoured from that even when he retired for the fourth time and moved to a retirement village. Even then he created a Bible study group and a Sunday worship group where he could once again be the preacher to a handful of residents. His words, efforts, and presence touched thousands of lives, but now, 5 months later, there was little tangible evidence of it. Maybe that’s what made the bedroom furniture more difficult to let go of. It was something tangible.

Many of the churches he pastored have closed up shop. Of those that remain, dad is merely a picture on the wall where pictures of previous pastors hang as well. His name and signature are on business meeting minutes and other church documents tucked in a file cabinet in the church basement. Only a few church members remain who knew him. He outlived most of them.

His death has been a source of grief for me, but more than that it has been a reminder of the nature of loss. We have no guarantee of the outcomes of any of our actions. We have no way of knowing who will remember us or what we did. I do believe our influence lives on forever through the people whose lives we touch and the lives they then touch. However, in a short time that influence will not be attributed to us. Our presence gets washed away from the shore pretty quickly. In a very short time there’s barely a trace.

Dad’s world, like most who die slowly, got smaller and smaller with time. He lived in his own house 4 years ago. He preached every Sunday until he was 93. Four years ago his world shrunk to a two-bedroom apartment where he could sit on his front porch and have conversations with passers-by. He continued to read, to write sermons, to preach, and stayed in touch through email. Before moving to nursing care his final month ,though, his apartment had been reduced to moving between his bed and his recliner and the bathroom. By the end he was in a bed in a single room in nursing care with no awareness of anything beyond that.

During a conversation with the hospice chaplain in his last week, dad looked around the room, which consisted of his recliner, a bed, and a dresser and asked the chaplain, “Am I at home?” The chaplain turned to me with a look of, “How do I answer that?”

I replied, “Yes, dad, you are home. This is where you live.”

He smiled and said, “OK, I thought so.”

Home gets smaller. Possessions love value, then cease to exist. Connections with loved ones even disappear in the narrowing process of dying. Letting go of the bedroom furniture was both painful and effortless for me. Painful because it was a symbol of finality. It was letting go of a connection to mom and dad and history. It was effortless because I knew, in the bigger picture, it was just furniture.