1. Once, when I was in junior high and my dad and I were going through one of our times of not getting along, he sent me a letter. I can only remember two things about it. One was that after my friend Jan read it, she said, “He sounds like a preacher.”

2. After a long career that involved meeting people all the time, and talking to them, and making presentations to City Councils and so forth, my dad has diagnosed himself with social anxiety disorder. (Thanks a lot for that, Mayo Clinic Newsletter.)

3. My mom really was very shy. In groups, especially, until she found one person (or a child: she liked kids) to talk to.

4. Both of them were generally content to spend their time in each other’s company, doing quiet things like reading or sewing. They almost never went out with friends, and as far as I know my dad always came straight home from work at the end of the day. (Right after my dad retired, there was some talk of taking ballroom dancing with another couple, but that never got past the talking-about-it-stage.)

5. They both were active church members. Once, my mom was teaching Sunday School for three year olds – the class was called Toddlers – at the same time my dad taught a class for senior citizens. He dubbed them the Old Toddlers. We laughed about that for a long time, but don’t bring it up any more: now that he is an Old Toddler himself, it might not be quite as amusing as it used to be.

6. So depending on how you look at it, this either makes no sense or a lot of sense: both of them spent years working as volunteer chaplains at the hospital. They’d go on hospital visits every Sunday afternoon, still wearing their good church clothes, and spend a few hours stopping by to visit patients.

7. My deepest admiration goes to them for doing that; it’s not something I could do.

8. It’s been almost fifteen years since Methodist Hospital changed its name (and its religious affiliation, too) to Covenant Medical Center. But, my parents’ nametags from their chaplain days were still in the dresser drawer.

Lubbock, Texas
photographed 9.1.2013

The house was a time capsule, much of it frozen in place the day my mom died in 2005.  The level of housekeeping fell off, the amount of space that was lived in decreased.  A few things, though, kept progressing onward.  Like wall calendars.  My dad has a strong fondness for calendars (they are his go-to Christmas gift for the sons-in-law and grandsons – trains, airplanes, beer, or other special-interest topics chosen specifically for the recipient) and he always treated himself to one or two while he was placing the order.  His own choices ran to steam locomotives and scenery from England.  For as long as I can remember, a calendar has hung on the left side of the back door, swinging from a nail he pounded into the maple paneling decades ago.

I’m not sure I would have ever decided to hang a calender in the bathroom, but he did:  a calendar from the Texas Tech alumni association is there on the wall.  (Don’t get the wrong impression:  he’s a proud TTU graduate.)

These two calendars – the train one by the back door and the college one above the toilet – are frozen in a different time capsule:  August 2012.  One morning in the third week of that month, he failed to show up at my husband’s office, as had been his daily habit for the nineteen years since his retirement.  My son, who works at the same office, went to look for him, and found him on the floor, under the train calendar.  He’d been there all night.

An ambulance came, against his wishes, and took him to the hospital.  He’s not been home since.  In the intervening months, he’s been in the hospital two times, had a pacemaker implanted, been in one facility we came to refer to as a “skilled” nursing facility, and been in another one that really did have skilled and caring staff; currently lives in an assisted living center.  There were times early on when we were all pretty sure he wasn’t going to make it, and times when we thought he’d be able to live at at home again.  We were wrong on both.

Cleaning out his house wasn’t as emotional as I had thought it would be.  I think I somehow compartmentalized it as just some old, fairly interesting stuff I happened to be sorting through, instead of letting myself think of it as his stuff.  Stuff I was deciding to keep, or throw away, or put into the estate sale.

Most of the time, I was able to maintain this false front.  I was an archeologist, working in a still-standing relic!  I was an historian, looking at interesting artifacts!  I was researching interesting names from long-ago family members!  (Lulu Green – what a fantastic name!)

But I didn’t let myself become The Oldest Daughter, working at her grim task.

Until the bathroom.

That’s when the ephemera of an old man’s life got to me.  The drawer full of disposal razors.  The half-used tube of toothpaste and the barely-worn toothbrush.  The black plastic comb.   Hand lotion tipped up to get the last bits out of the bottle.  A metal nail file.  And the padded toilet seat.  His walker parked there, because he needed help getting up from the toilet.  The unstrung role of toilet paper.  A completed crossword puzzle book in the wastebasket.  And the calendar, turned to August 2012.

Lubbock, Texas
photographed 9.1.2013