Today I was giving this blog a minor visual refresh — slight color tweaks, new fonts, adding back just a slight hint of the skeuomorphism we all so violently rejected after the release of iOS 7 — when I realized that a lot of my posts were… missing.
Oh, they weren’t gone. They were just switched to draft mode. For some reason, at some point in the last year, I decided I needed to unpublish over 2/3 of the posts on this blog (going back over 20 years). Why? Beats me. Something probably set me off and I decided it was easier just to hide my past thoughts away than deal with whatever minor stir something had caused.
But I don’t remember. I vaguely remember doing it, but I don’t remember why.
Then again, I’ve done a lot of rash things over the past year. Selling all of my basses (and buying a whole new set to replace them). Cleaning out the basement with such fervor that I just put my entire CD collection, going back to 1989, out in the alley for anyone to take. Erasing the past. Or, at least, pushing it aside.
My mom died in September 2022. My dad was a shell of himself after that, even before he took a nasty fall in the Kwik Trip parking lot the next April. By June, after more falls, I was moving him into assisted living, and I was tasked with cleaning out their apartment in Rochester. I’m an only child. The entirety of physical artifacts left behind by two fully lived human lives were placed in my hands, to decide what to do with.
There were countless loads of kitchenware, decorative vases, blankets, clothes, and small furniture pieces, piled into my dad’s SUV and driven to Goodwill. A bin of photo albums transferred to our basement in Minneapolis. A few cherished items in a tin box in my mom kept in her beside table. That tin box is now on a bookshelf next to my desk.
The TV.
My parents still lived in their house in Austin when I bought the TV for them, two days before Christmas 2021. Their old one had died just before we came for the holidays. I was still avoiding going inside stores if I could help it, even though I was fully vaccinated against covid by that time — which was the only reason we were there for Christmas in the first place. I ordered the TV for curbside pickup at the local Walmart. Brought it home and set it up for them.
That’s the TV my mom watched her escapist Hallmark movies on as she was slowly dying of lung cancer. It’s the TV my parents and I watched as CNN reported on the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and I was proud that my parents were as outraged as I was. (This was not a Fox News household.) It’s the TV my dad left tuned to MSNBC or old cowboy reruns, the volume muted, listlessly scrolling his iPhone, in the months after the apartment became his alone.
It’s the TV that made its way to the assisted living apartment in Richfield last summer, and that was left on by the staff on the morning of September 1, quietly playing soothing music, in the bedroom where his lifeless body awaited the mortuary. Where I touched his cold hand and said my final goodbye.
Now that TV sits in our living room, and I curse its slow webOS interface as I try to stream Seinfeld reruns on Netflix.
You see, objects carry a history. And while I spent a lot of time last year making room in our house for objects from my parents’ lives — over 150 years of human life, combined — and the history they contain, I needed to push some of my own history aside. To make physical space, and to make mental space. I couldn’t think about the repercussions, because that thinking takes up space, too.
Somewhere in the midst of all of the literal and metaphorical housecleaning, I decided my blog posts needed to go away too, at least for a while. But in this case, it’s possible to bring them back. Unlike the CDs. Unlike my parents.
