“A Totally Shit Time”

This blog about stuff and pastimes has never been about my feelings or emotions but today I want to start by writing about my oldest daughter who died last week after living with Stage 4 colon cancer for almost three years. We will miss her so much especially her quick wit and her easy going temperament. I am so glad I got to be her Mom.

No one who know me will be surprised that I want to share a quote from a TV show. “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist” features this conversation between Zoey and her father’s caretaker on the day her father dies of progressive supranuclear palsy. “Is this when we have the talk about what death is like?” she asks him. “Death is hideous and ugly and grotesque and wildly, wildly unfair,” he says. “Or maybe death is beautiful and spiritual and transcendent and sometimes a very necessary and very freeing escape from our physical bodies when they are no longer habitable.” Exactly.

My younger daughter had another quote to relate. She said she kept thinking of a quote from the movie “Love Actually”. “Listen, it was always going to be a totally shit time” the character played by Emma Thompson says to the character played by Liam Neeson when they are talking about the behavior of his stepson after his mother dies.

So let’s talk about stuff in this totally shit time. My older daughter lived alone so my younger daughter, my husband, and I had to begin by packing up her apartment. We reminisced as we sorted and packed and we realized there were several categories of stuff. There were things we wanted to keep for sentimental reasons like her first stuffed animal, there were things we wanted to keep because we or other family members gave them to her, there were things we wanted to keep just because we liked them or because we didn’t have one of them or because hers was better than ours, there were things we didn’t need but we thought other family members might, there were some things that we couldn’t keep at all because we couldn’t imagine anyone else having or using them even us, and there were things we wanted to donate.

And then we realized that this totally shit time is even shittier than usual in the time of Corona because all the donation places are closed and we have furniture, bags of clothing, and boxes of books, records, and appliances and more sitting in her apartment with no place to go.