I Haven’t Lost Everything but I Know Someone Who Did

Daily writing prompt

What would you do if you lost all your possessions?

View all responses

In 1970, when my grandmother was in her mid-eighties and consigned to a nursing home because of her propensity for falling, my mother and her brother conferred about how to pay for her care.

It’s not for me to say they had a variety of strategies to choose from, although I think they did, both siblings married with decent incomes, one way more than decent. What they decided to do was to sell my grandmother’s house with everything in it. Oh, there were some scrapbooks retrieved, a few pieces of furniture, like my grandmother’s pedal sewing machine, but everything else was sold. The solid oak pedestal dining room table, the oak hutch, the dishes, silver, embroidered pillows, even, I suspect, my grandfather’s shaving brush and bowl tucked in the medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom. He died in 1944.

The house that was sold still stands. Every time I go to Hastings to visit my parents’ graves, I drive by. It is out of a sense of profound yearning that I need to see the house. I’d never ask to come inside. It would break my heart. I avoid things that will break my heart. It’s been a life long habit.

But my grandmother’s heart had to have been broken. The house was built by her husband soon after they were married in 1915. She was his second wife, the first one having died a few years prior, and now a mother to his five-year old son. Three more children would be born. Of the four, two would die before my grandmother and two would decide how to pay for her nursing home care.

I visited my grandmother in the nursing home many times. I drove from Lansing in my VW. She lived in a room with a hospital bed. Once when I came to see her, she was sprawled, uncovered, in her bed, wearing an old nightgown that showed her old shrunken legs. That was a bad day. On a good day when she was up and walking around in her flowered dress and her shiny lace-up shoes, I’d ask her how she was, how she felt about living in the nursing home, wanting to know if her heart was broken because she’d lost her house and, well, everything.

And she would always say that she was fine in the nursing home. “I don’t want to be a bother,” she would say. And that became her mantra. “I don’t want to be a bother. I don’t want to be a bother.” And then I would nod and be cheery and drive home wishing I’d thought to retrieve my grandfather’s shaving brush and bowl. I knew exactly where it was.