One of the fire stations that I worked at was first-in on a mid-rise building that seemed to have an inordinate amount of widows living in it. And it was not rare to be running EMS assist calls there, as you might expect.
Most of these apartments, not all, had something in common that would catch our attention as soon as we entered. Looking around the unit as we went inside, we would see that all the tabletops and shelves, and anything else with a horizontal surface, were filled with knick-knacks. More often than not, they were decorative glass or ceramics doo-dads.
Right now I’ll bet you’re thinking, “We were in a place like that not long ago.” Yep, they pop up everywhere. And we would always be so puzzled as to why these Old Dears would have their tiny 1BR apartment packed with this stuff. Sometimes you could hardly move around.
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It wasn’t until several years later that the answer suddenly materialized in my thinking machine, and then it all made sense. These ladies were obviously widowed and living out their final years in whatever comfort they could afford and it was fairly obvious that they were long-time residents of the city. I believe that they probably lived their entire adult lives in the same house where they raised their family and then retired. Most likely they were comfortable in their surroundings and had no desire, or perhaps the means, to move elsewhere for this next stage in their lives.
Eventually the husband passes away and the widow gets older until she reaches the point where taking care of the house is just too much. Sometimes the expense of maintaining it and paying the taxes is too burdensome. So the time comes where she makes the decision to sell off the old family home and move into the fresh apartment where life becomes so much easier for her.
The hardest part of relocating from a big house into a 3-room apartment is deciding what few things that you will take with you. Most of her life’s accumulations will have to be disbursed or discarded. And after a painful winnowing down of these landmarks of life, she moves into the new digs with as much of her memories that she can take with her.
Each of them has a story that is important to her. That simple little bud vase carries an important memory from those easier and happier days gone by. And now she’s at that stage of life where the future is really short and all that she has left is what she has surrounded herself with. Memories. It must have been so painful to have left some of those mementoes behind when she took this final step along her life’s path.
The next time you’re called to one of these “cluttered” homes, take care. You’re looking at somebody’s life there….. and what you are seeing is all that they have left of it.
Now let’s get the equipment checked out. I need to start the coffee maker.
