Emptying the House by the End of the Month

Saturday afternoon, and he is sitting on the end of his mother's bed with a shirt in his hands.

It is not even hers. It is his father's, a work shirt, checked, the collar gone soft, and she kept it in her wardrobe for eleven years after the funeral, at the end of the rail, between the good coat and the dressing gown. He has known it was there since he was thirty one. He has never once asked her about it.

The boxes are still flat against the wardrobe door. He brought twenty of them in this morning and has assembled four. There is a marker on the windowsill with the lid off, drying out, because he cannot decide what to write on the sides.

That is the thing nobody warns you about. The categories.

Keep. Family. Charity. And then the fourth one, which nobody says out loud, and which is most of a house. A drawer of takeaway menus and rubber bands. Half a bottle of hand cream. Reading glasses on the windowsill with a smear on the left lens, and he cannot throw away her glasses, and he cannot keep her glasses, and so the glasses stay exactly where they are and he moves on to the next thing and then he sits down again.

Downstairs there is a note from the agent about the keys, and a date on it. The end of the month. It is a perfectly reasonable date. Everyone has been perfectly reasonable. The agent, the solicitor, his sister who lives too far away, the neighbor who keeps offering. Everybody is being reasonable and kind, and the house still has to be empty in nineteen days, and grief has been handed a clearance deadline like a job.

He opens the wardrobe again and the smell comes out at him. Not perfume. Just her. Cotton and soap and the inside of that house.

And he stands there holding a shirt his father wore in 1994, that his mother could not part with, that he is now supposed to sort into a category by a date set by somebody who never met either of them.

You are somewhere in this house too.

Maybe it is a flat, or one room, or a bungalow with forty years in the loft. Maybe you have a sibling doing it with you, or maybe you are doing it alone with a car boot and a list. But you know the sitting down. You know the object that stops you, and you know it is never the important object. It is a jar of buttons. It is the way they wrote the number seven.

And underneath all of it is the thing you would not say to anyone who came to help: it feels like you are dismantling them. Like every box is a second, smaller funeral that nobody attends, that you have to carry out yourself, with a marker in your hand, on a schedule.

What a house can and cannot hold

I am not going to make this lighter than it is. It is not lighter than it is.

You are doing the hardest kind of grief work there is, which is grief that comes with logistics. Most people get to fall apart. You have to fall apart while making decisions about a chest of drawers. And you are doing it inside a deadline set by an agent or a landlord or a probate process, none of whom are cruel, and none of whom can possibly know that the thing which took your legs out from under you this afternoon was a shirt at the end of a rail. Psalm 34:18 puts God nearest to precisely this, to the broken hearted and the crushed in spirit, and His Spirit is in the doorway of that bedroom rather than waiting downstairs for you to be composed about it.

I will not tell you what this is for. I do not know, and anyone who tells you they do is guessing at God's reasons in a bedroom where you can still smell the wardrobe. There is no lesson in this house that is worth your mother. There is no sentence anybody can say that squares the account.

What I have is smaller and, I think, truer.

There is a very old prayer, written by a man who spent forty years watching a whole generation die in a wilderness, so he knew exactly what he was talking about when it came to loss and to counting.

Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.Psalm 90:1

Sit with the word. Dwelling place. Three thousand years have not worn it thin, and the Spirit of God carries it as far as the carpet you are kneeling on with a marker in your hand.

He does not say God gave us a dwelling place. He says God is one. And he says it in the past tense, looking backwards, over generations, which is the only direction from which you can ever say a thing like that.

Now think about what that means in a house you are emptying.

Your mother lived here. This was her address, her hall, her chair, her particular sound on the stairs. And this house held her for as long as houses can hold anybody, which is not for very long, and then it stopped, and now it is being handed back to somebody else along with the keys. Psalm 90:1 was never written about bricks, and the Holy Spirit has been present at every address on that list, including this one, including this afternoon.

But she was living somewhere else the whole time. So were you. So was the generation before her, in a different house you have only seen in photographs, and the one before that, in a country or a street nobody in your family can name anymore. Every one of them was dwelling in God while they lived at those addresses, and God is the only address in that whole line that is not currently being cleared out by somebody's son on a Saturday.

That is not a consolation prize and it is not a way of saying the house does not matter. The house matters enormously. Grieving a house is a real grief, and you are grieving two things at once right now, which is why it is so much heavier than you expected. None of that is weakness. Psalm 90 counts days honestly and never once shames the man doing the counting, and His Spirit sits with the second grief as readily as with the first.

It is simply the truth about where your family has actually been living all along. The house empties. The dwelling place does not. And you are in it, today, on the end of that bed, with the shirt in your hands, and God is not standing at the door waiting for you to finish so that he can be with you when it is tidier.

He is in the room. He has always done his best work in rooms exactly this heavy.