When I Say Goodbye

ON THE LAST DAY of November 2016, my brother Marc and I were wrapping up three months of cleaning out our parents’ house. We had uncovered the wood floors just the day before. The carpet, over a half-century old, filled the dumpster. The house was scheduled to go on the market December first, so in a last-minute Hail Mary, we had ripped out the brown broadloom, heavy with dirt, reeking of cigarette smoke and cat pee. I had just vacuumed the tobacco-stained cobwebs off the walls and the powdery dust, like gray velvet, out of the hall closet.

Mom and Dad had lived in the 1950s tri-level for forty years, raising children, celebrating birthdays and Christmases, cooking dinner and feeding animals and watching television and reading the paper. Every room—every shelf and drawer and cupboard and corner—had overflowed with the stuff of two lifetimes, both priceless and worthless.

The many happy hours of my childhood had kept me company as I combed through stack after stack, but there were days when anger at my parents for burying themselves under their possessions had eclipsed love. I couldn’t quite shake that nagging resentment.

The house finally unburdened, my footsteps echoed through the hollow rooms. I held my phone up, snapping pictures. Even emptied of its familiar artifacts, bookshelves, and framed family photographs, it was home, a place I knew in my bones. The camera captured sunlit floors and peeling, blue-flowered wallpaper, but all I could see were the ghosts of memories lurking around every corner, flitting on the thin edge between my past and present—seared afterimages, impossible to blink away.

Dad holding me as he walked down the stairs, looking at the house for the first time. Mom wrapping my tiny body in a towel by the blue bathtub. A boyfriend kissing me behind my bedroom door, his hands tight on my waist. My little sister, Krista, and I building a fort in the family room. Marc and I creeping upstairs after midnight to peek under the Christmas tree. My parents swaying in the kitchen to the radio, my dad dipping my mom dramatically, both of them laughing.

My father’s knees buckling in the entryway, the news of my mother’s death leveling him with the force of an earthquake.

, Dad and I had visited my mom’s grave for Memorial Day. She had suffered a fatal heart attack at sixty-eight while on vacation near San Diego, where she grew up, and was cremated before the trip home to Idaho. Everyone who knew her had reeled at the shock of it: Mom