bekahcubed

Prompt #3: “What was your bedroom like growing up? Did you share it with your siblings, or did you have it to yourself? Can you remember the carpeting, the wallpaper, the pictures that hung? What did you do to make it your own?”

My sister Anna had her own room for a blessed 14 months before I showed up, wrecking all of her plans of displaying play food on low shelves. With my advent, her small toys were banished to an upper shelf waiting for my nap-time.

Not that I remember that bedroom.

The first bedroom I really remember is the one where Anna and I spent much of our elementary years.

It was the largest bedroom in the house, maybe 12’x14′(?). This was the room where Anna and I fitfully shared the full-sized bed (fitfully due to Anna’s penchant for tickling and/or kicking me OUT of said bed.) This was the room where Anna and I much more peacefully shared the same crack of light from the hallway (so we could better read our novels after lights out.)

This was also the room where our doll changing table/crib (that Dad made for us) was set up and where the blue bookshelf (that Dad also made for us) held our favorite books.

This was the room that contained the closet that was perpetually overflowing with dirty clothes because we were less than diligent about doing our laundry. The doll changing table/crib was where we once found an apple core that was filled with maggots due to my disobedience to the rule about not eating anywhere but the dining room–and due to our rather lax room-cleaning habits.

This was the room that was almost perpetually a mess.

Every so often, our parents would get fed up with the mess and issue an ultimatum. Either we cleaned the room or Mom and Dad would come in with a broom and a trash bag and do it for us.

No way we’d let them throw away our treasures. We took to the room with a broom first, sweeping everything into the center and then dividing out the pile into a dozen littler piles, then finding homes for the items in each pile.

Finally, the pale hardwood floor would be fully visible.

Oh, that hardwood floor.

How we hated it.

How we wished we could have carpet like the rest of the house.

We begged and pleaded for carpet, but to little avail. How would we manage to clean carpet with the kind of messes we made? It would be a disaster.

Still, we petitioned our parents until they relented.

Conditionally.

We could have carpet if we could keep our room clean for a month.

And so we did.

Mom and Dad, with remarkable foresight, gave us not the wall-to-wall carpet we’d dreamed of, but a single large area rug for the center of the room.

While it wasn’t what we’d wanted, it turned out to be a wise move. Because within weeks (days?), the room was back to being a pit. “Do you think we live in a pigsty?” my parents would occasionally ask.

Maybe they didn’t, but we kinda did.

We knew it and were rather ashamed of it, but not enough to do something about it in the long term. We hadn’t the diligence to tidy it on a regular basis.

Instead, we spent our preteen years performing semi-regular all-night cleaning parties. We’d get out our brooms, sweep everything onto the carpet, and swear we wouldn’t go to sleep until we’d gotten it clean.

Six to eight hours later, we could roll up the carpet and sweep underneath it.

We couldn’t vacuum it, because by then it was six or so in the morning.

Instead, we went to bed exhausted, vacuumed (or beat) our carpet the next day, and unrolled it again across the floor.

A few years later, my Aunt Martha and my dad built a room for Anna and I in our previously unfinished basement. The teenaged and pre-teen kids (the first four of us) moved into the basement and Mom and Dad moved into the room that had previously been Anna’s and mine. Before they moved in, they carpeted the floor with dark green wall-to-wall carpeting.

As my sister and I neared the end of our teenage years, our family collectively realized that our allergies were being exacerbated by carpeting–and we pulled up all the carpet that had hardwood floors (or concrete) underneath. All except Mom and Dad’s room that is.

When Mom and Dad finally added on a few years back, they laid hardwood floors in the living room–leaving that one corner room as the only carpeted room in the house.

That’s the guest room now, and where Anna and I stay when we visit our parents in Lincoln.

Ironic, isn’t it?

Prompt #2: What was your first encounter with death? Was it a person or an animal? Did you have any rituals or otherwise “do” something with you grief? Or did you even understand what was going on?

My family didn’t keep pets so animal death didn’t really enter my equation–and my Grandpa Menter died before I can remember. So my first experience with death was when I was seven years old and my aunt delivered her daughter Melinda–stillborn.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table, crying and crying and crying. Of course, I’d never met Melinda, never had the opportunity to. But I grieved for her, for my aunt and uncle, for our family.

In my young grief, I’m not sure I was the best comforter, but I wrote my aunt a letter nonetheless. I wrote of my sorrow and grief-but I also told her I was praying that she would have another daughter, a daughter just like Melinda to fill the hole.

The funeral was just a blur for me. All I remember was being cold, standing outside in January.

My second really memorable experience of death came much later, when I was already in college and my Grandma Menter died.

She’d had Alzheimer’s for years and we’d had some forewarning of her decline as she moved from independent senior living to assisted living to an Alzheimer’s ward where she eventually went on hospice.

We’d visited her the weekend before, said what we knew would be our last goodbyes. She wasn’t eating or drinking at that point-she was clearly at the end.

The news came for sure on a Wednesday, over my lunch hour, right before my health aide class. I must have cried a little or something, because I ended up telling my instructors that she had died–and they encouraged me to go home. I pooh-poohed them, said nothing was to be gained by my going home. But I could only handle half of the class and ended up leaving before the three hours were up.

I’d expected to be ready, you see. I’d had plenty of time to settle into the idea that Grandma was dying. The Grandma I’d known as a child had left long ago, leaving a new Grandma more like a child than an elder.

But the preparations for the funeral brought me to the end of myself.

I couldn’t help. I couldn’t do anything. My parents and aunts and uncles were busily making arrangements and I could do nothing.

My siblings, all of whom had dealt with their grief long before Grandma died, went to a movie.

I felt helpless in my grief, guilty for not having done more when I could, angry that I couldn’t do anything now, even more angry that none of my siblings seemed to care.

I’d always been close to Grandma. I didn’t know it at the time, but Grandma attributed her decision to finally move to Lincoln (where her sons and their families were) to a conversation she’d had with the pre-teen me. Whatever I’d said had convinced her that yes, it was safest and best for her to be near us.

She’d started going blind before she moved, but we noticed the dementia progressing rapidly once she got to Lincoln. It got to the point we worried that she was eating properly. I went over to Grandma’s townhouse and cooked for her. She fell in the bathroom one day and I went over to help clean her up and make sure she was okay. While she was at the senior living townhouse, I was a caretaker and companion of sorts for her.

And then she went to assisted living. I didn’t visit her there, only saw her when we picked her up for church activities on Sundays and throughout the week. Anna and I picked her up for our home group, and laughed along with her while she shared her slightly rambling stories of childhood.

She wasn’t in assisted living long before she had to move further. We were blessed to have gotten a spot at a wonderful Alzheimer’s facility in town–wonderful for my Grandma and for the rest of the family, I know, but devastating for me in a way I didn’t realize until after she’d died.

You see, when Grandma went into the Alzheimer’s care facility, she ceased needing me, at least in my mind. I couldn’t do anything there for her. There were professionals there doing all the stuff I used to do–feeding her, helping her walk, pushing her wheelchair, helping her to the bathroom. I was helpless, so I withdrew.

I still saw her once a week when we picked her up for church and took her to dinner afterward, but our interaction was changed. She didn’t remember me by then, barely even remembered my dad. She knew he was important to her, but could only come up with “relative”, not “son”.

When she died and I could do nothing with the funeral, the weight of my helplessness in those last days fell upon me. I wept and wept and wept, blessed by the help of others, but feeling guilty at the same time.

I did nothing. I did nothing. I did nothing. My mind ran it over again and again. I left her before she died, left her in degrees. And now she was gone and I’d left her.

I still look back with sorrow on how I withdrew from Grandma once I could no longer help her. But I also see how God used my grief surrounding Grandma’s funeral to chip away at my self-reliance and make me realize my need for him and for the body of Christ.

In my grief over my helplessness and how I’d failed to do what I still could have done (be a companion), God reminded me of my utter helplessness in so many things. He reminded me of how I fall short of holiness. He reminded me that I need Him.