What I Left Behind
“The house needs to be cleaned out so we can sell it,” I told my cousin Marcy this past fall. “But I can’t do it.”
My childhood home and I had a contentious relationship.
As a kid, I fantasized that when I grew up I’d drive away and never look back. In reality, I returned many times since leaving for college three decades before. At first it was mostly just for holidays. Then, after my father’s sudden death in 2019, I’d travel monthly to Massachusetts from New Jersey to see my mother.
Living with a mild cognitive impairment, she was doing well on her own, better than anyone expected. Until a week after turning 79, when my mom fell and fractured her pelvis. She went from the hospital to rehab to a respite stay in assisted living.
Hoping she’d return home eventually, I left my mom’s arthritic cat, Katie, in the three-bedroom brick ranch my parents bought in 1968, paying someone to come to feed her twice a day. Before her accident, my mother had resisted being away from Katie for even one night. Now she didn’t ask about the cat once. It was like my mom’s pet—and everything from her former world—existed in another dimension she could no longer access.
Her body was healing, but the stress from the injury caused delirium which evolved into dementia. She knew something bad had happened, but she didn’t know what. Some days all she could say was, “I’m scared.”
I was scared too.
Over the next months, two things were clear: The cat couldn’t stay in the house alone any longer, and my mother couldn’t return to it. Katie went to a foster home and my mom went to a memory-care residence.
Meanwhile, I was left to manage the studio set where the five-decade drama of my family had been staged: two suicide attempts by my mother, one in the basement, the other in the garage. My father’s fatal heart attack, in the middle of the night in his home office. My eating disorder phase, making myself sick in the bathroom while visiting from college.
Our home had seen it all. I imagined it looking away from us over the years, embarrassed by our inability to keep it together.
“Do we still have the house?” my mother asked when I saw her recently. I was tempted to say no, to pretend it was already sold. But I went with the truth.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s just as you left it.”
It was. Everything was frozen in time like the relics of Pompeii. My mom’s pajamas from the night before her fall were still tucked under her pillow, clothes from the previous day neatly folded on the chair in the corner of the bedroom, reading glasses on top of the People magazine from the second week in October, 2023.
The average annual price for memory care is $95,000, according to U.S. News and World Report. My mother’s facility cost nearly twice that, and it wasn’t covered by insurance. After using my parents’ retirement account, I needed money from the sale of the house to pay. But no part of me wanted to start the process.
My childhood dream of escape returned. Couldn’t I just sell the house as-is, with everything in it? Leave someone else not only the skeletons of our beloved cats buried in the backyard, but the bones of our buried bad memories?
“I can’t do it,” I told Marcy.
“I think you can,” she said. “I’ll help.”
I hated to bother her with a job I knew was mine, but the possibility of time with her was intoxicating. I was one of ten cousins, an only child and the youngest girl. Marcy was the oldest, nineteen when I was born; I viewed her as a celebrity.
When my grandmother deemed me too young, at age six, to attend Marcy’s wedding, I knew I was missing the family event of the century.
We scheduled the cleaning during my winter break from work. Marcy lived in Massachusetts. She picked me up from the train station before Hanukkah with a bottle of wine and my favorite snacks: cheese and crackers, chips and dip. I pretended I wasn’t so different from the other people on the train returning to their own families at holiday time. Though I was probably the only one coming not to seek comfort in my childhood home, but to dismantle it.
Once we arrived, Marcy and I headed straight for my mom’s bedroom. Maybe we realized that starting with her most personal space would be like delivering the head of a baby first— the rest would come easily.
Together we went through each item in my mother’s closet, all of the discounted clothing from thrift shops mingled with high-end boutique purchases for special occasions.
“This was for my Bat Mitzvah,” I said, of the elegant cream silk gown with the pleated skirt that flowed out at the bottom like an upside-down ice cream sundae glass.
“And she wore this to my father’s funeral,” I reminded my cousin of a black-and-white linen dress with a matching jacket. Everyone had been impressed that my mother had gotten up to speak at the service.
When I called her each week now, she often apologized. “I’m so sorry this is happening,” she said. “You deserve a much better mother. I want you to be proud of me.”
I assured her that I was.
“I can’t remember what happened or why I’m so upset,” she said. “Am I reliving something?”
Maybe she was, and maybe I was, too. We were both digging through the relics of our lives, trying to find a story that made sense.
Marcy and her husband, Ken, and I cleaned for four days straight. Carloads of things went to Savers, treasures for someone else to find.
I allowed myself one box: The Passover seder plate, which reminded me of the time one of my cousins opened the door or Elijah and instead of a Biblical ghost, our cat, Ketsy, ran in, and we all laughed. The wicker kangaroo that sat on the kitchen counter, its pouch a receptacle for pens and pencils. My father had pulled a red pen from there to teach me how to draw a heart when I was four years old. I pretended to need more help than I did because I liked having his attention. The copy of The Velveteen Rabbit that my mother read to me over and over. We always cried at the end, when the boy’s stuffed rabbit, now real, came back to visit him one last time.
I kept the framed poem my mother wrote for me on my Bat Mitzvah, in dark-pink marker on light-pink paper. And the letters I wrote her, she had held onto each one. They were each filled with my tiny writing, both sides of the interior of the card plus the back, with reassurance that she was the best mother, that I appreciated her and believed in her, and wished she would believe in herself. Just like I said to her now on our phone calls.
She never did gain the wisdom of the lion by the end of the Wizard of Oz: that courage was within her all along.
My cousins and I cleaned through my December and January visits. On my February trip, the junk removal team came. Two dumpsters later, everything was gone. I brought some trinkets to my mother to keep in her new room: a ceramic swan whose wings were filled with delicate ceramic flowers and a figurine of a girl and boy holding hands. But she wasn’t really interested. So I held her hand during our visit, and went with her to Chair Zumba.
“We used to dance to that song in the living room,” I said, when an old Neil Diamond tune came on. I would put on a purple dress given to me by a neighbor with layers of tissue-thin lavender fabric that caught wind when I spun, and do the box step my mother taught me. The dress was long gone, and the record, and now the record player. But we were still here, together.
I thought emptying out the house would make me feel empty too. Surprisingly, I felt healed. During the sacred dance of figuring out what to keep and what to give away, I’d finally made peace with my childhood home.
Joy Peskin is a senior executive editor of children’s books at a major publishing house, a CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) for youth in foster care, and an essayist who won a Simon Rockower Award for her writing for Lilith.
