On the Table

What am I going to do with Marlou's clothes?  She has a closet full of them.  Actually, if one thinks about it, she probably has more, for there are bits and pieces scattered about drawers and cupboards upstairs.  For now, what concerns me is the bedroom closet.  I haven't opened it except to retrieve a folding wheelchair or stash a suitcase.  Marlou's hanging clothes never affected me in these moments.  I am visually unobservant, as she used to note.  But even in my normal state of oblivion, opening the bedroom closet and sliding a few hangers around eventually will reveal something reminiscent and evocative.  

Closets draw kids to them.  At night, they are portals to the dark and fearsome.  By day, they are the best places to hide.  In my adult variation, the closet is simply full.  It contains and holds and hangs.  It hangs over me.  

All sorts of people or charities or businesses will gladly take this closet off my hands.  Estate removal.  The process can be handled over the web, I suspect.  I am easy with sweeping out the old, jettisoning the unwanted.  Marlou was never very good at this.  She was something of a pack rat, holding onto possessions long after they had outlived their purpose or lost their meaning.  Our upstairs is full of unusable furniture, odd mementos and even notes Marlou took in college.  As for the clothes, all it takes is a little human help to see what's there, make some simple decisions.  There is a Cancer Society thrift shop in downtown Menlo Park that might want some stuff.  Goodwill for the rest.  

Marlou is bound to manifest in the dresses and tops hanging in her closet, one more painful remembrance, grief letting off its steam.  And there are bound to be blanks.  Did she ever wear this one?  Why can't I recall?  Was she saving it for some occasion?  There are, after all, ways in which we never got to know each other.  Ten years isn't that much time for two introverts.  A closet shows so many things, including the passage of body time.  Which brings me to my own.

One problem with my closet is that, during Marlou's illness, it relocated to my office.  I moved all my clothes into that room, hoping to dress without disturbing her.  There were certain advantages, some of them permanent, in swapping closets.  I was forever closing the doors of Marlou's closet when it was in my office.  At my desk, I didn't like the scent of old shoes and fresh dry cleaning.  Then with my clothes relocated to my office, I quietly dressed in the morning feeling like an exile.  I missed what was there before.  Marlou was bedridden and no longer dressing much.  The clothes hung in her closet unused.  I longed for her old sweaty shoes.  People are never satisfied.

And some day fairly soon, perhaps in the summer, I will deal with whatever is hanging in Marlou's closet.  I will remember and remove.  And the whole thing adds up to the next step.  And there is one.  That is the odd thing.  It's on the table.

The table is the one beside my bed.  For the longest time, it has posed a problem.  I wake up in the night.  I wake up repeatedly.  With paralysis, my bladder capacity has shrunk to that of an airline martini bottle.  In the stumbling darkness, I waken, reach with my one good arm for the plastic urinal on the bedside table, then reverse the process.  Somehow, reaching got difficult in the last few years.  Marlou had a way of waking herself at such moments and giving me a gentle shove.  It made all the difference.  The fact of her being awake seemed a gift.  Somehow over the years we had gotten into a mutual pattern of sleep.

Years ago at a hotel in Arizona, I found the perfect bedside table.  It was the right height and hung over the bed just enough to be in easy reach.  Rolling was barely necessary.  I scoured the Internet for something like it, but nothing came close.  It seemed almost mythic, the table in Phoenix, wondrous and unobtainable.  After a while, I forgot about the solution and got used to the problem.  Waking and reaching and straining.  The one obvious answer drifted in and out of my mind.  I needed a hospital-style table that hung over a bed.  Marlou, I knew, would like the idea, but she would want something decorative as well as functional.  The matter stalled.  Marlou grew ill.  There were other things to think about.

Now there aren't.  Ease and comfort have taken over.  They are the right things to think about.  Marlou may have been the bringer of optimism in our relationship, but I am the discoverer.  Reducing strain changes my overall perception of life.  The balance sheet feels better.  It's an accounting matter in the end.  A burden subtracted on one side of the ledger, increases the balance on the other.  All this is obvious to anyone whose mother was more or less on the job.  But mine was AWOL, and I am now doing my best to report for duty.  There's no keeping Marlou alive through obeisance to her home decorating.  First things first.  Hospital tables abound.  They get cast off all the time as people convalesce and die.  People sell them on Craigslist.  It's part of the rhythm of life.  Decor can come later.