The Psychology of Cleaning

I am not a clean freak.

Clean for me comes in levels.

As long as the floors are not sticky, there are no dust bunnies rolling along the floor like tumbleweeds, and I'm not embarassed to have a surprise visitor into my house, I am happy. I live in a world of clean, organized, clutter.

Sometimes cleaning makes me happy.

Other times it makes me sad.

When someone dies, and you do the final cleaning out, it becomes part of the process of closing the final chapter. You marvel over every little item as you hold it in your hands, and you treat everything as a gift from the beyond.

The memories that this type of cleaning invokes are powerful, gut wrenching and cathartic.

When you have to go through that process for someone who is still living, well, the emotions are quite different.

This week, it was determined that my grandmother will never be able to live alone. Because everyone still living here has to work during the day, she will have to stay in the nursing home she has been in since they found her unconscious in her apartment in April.

Although we have been paying her rent faithfully since then, we now understand that we have been fooling ourselves about her ever going back to her apartment. And now, we have determined that it is time to clean out.

We spent a few hours in there yesterday, going through things, and realizing where the pack rat nature in all of us came from.

In preparation for her death, she has been spending the time putting together scrapbooks for all of us. She has kept everything. She has the letter from the local school district giving her permission to enroll me in the school where she lived, and not the one where my mother lived. She has the card I left on her dresser the morning I got married. She has every mother's day card I ever gave her. Invitiations, pictures, report cards. All there, in a book in her closet.

She has a box for my young niece in FL, a child who should have died, and didn't. In this box are
mementos of her and my grandfather, notes attached to each one. And in this box is the stub of a holy candle that was lit every night by Alicia's picture, until one day, an ultrasound showed that the holes in her heart were closed. My grandmother believes it was a miracle.

There is an envelope that says "DO NOT OPEN UNTIL ?" (It was empty)

We have found things that will need to be carefully preserved for future generations, so that they will always know that this incredibly annoying, overbearing, insecure, crazy woman loved all of us with every ounce of her being.

If she does make a full recovery, she is going to be really pissed at us for going through her things.

But then again, if she makes a full recovery, she'll get over it.