Twenty years ago, sensing retirement was on the horizon, my parents bought a home on Sanibel Island. They’d never been much for Florida. They didn’t fancy themselves as ordinary blue hairs, driving Lincoln Continentals way to slow while they searched for the nearest bingo game or all you could eat buffet.
No, Sanibel Island was different. Sanibel Island, as my mom liked to say, was “Not Florida.”
It was a lovely place on the 6th hole of a golf course, surrounded by tropical trees and nesting birds and yes, even a few alligators. For a while they rented the house out, catering to Germans (my father had a penchant for all things German) who wanted to vacation in a place that was clearly “not Florida.” Eventually, they retired there. Snowbirds, they call them. Retired couples who spend the warm months up north and then fly south for the winter.
They played golf. They walked the beach. They hunted for shells. They ate out at restaurants and frequented the Southwest Florida Symphony. They made friends, lots of friends. It was where their heart was and it became their home.
And it was a great life.
When Mom’s memory started to fail, Dad picked up the slack. He was a born leader and taking over came naturally to him. He organized their social life, took care of the things that needed fixing and carried on, as though nothing had changed. He became the brains of the operation.
Life was good. Or so we thought.
It started suddenly. An innocent tumble during a trip to the New York Museum of Natural History began a year of doctor’s appointments, trips to specialists and online searches. In the end, the news was not good. Dad had ALS. Within a couple of months of the diagnosis, he was gone.
“I found him,” read the text from my brother. I was on my way to Florida to meet him to clean out the house and prepare it, once again, for rental. He had arrived a day earlier and set out looking for Dad’s ashes. They’d been missing since Mom came back north, this time, for good.
“Where?” I shot back. A family friend had scoured the place, searching high and low with no success.
Turns out Dad was doing laundry.
It was a hectic week. We sorted and tossed and tossed and sorted and put lots of stuff away. There were beautiful pieces of Italian pottery and four sets of golf clubs and albums from trips to Italy and Spain and Egypt. And there were photos. Dozens of photos. Of children and grandchildren, of places they had been and things they had seen. Photographs of a life lived to the fullest. Photographs of a life that ended too soon.
While their grandkids practiced putting around the yard, their children sifted through years of accumulated stuff. Funny how often that happens. The longer you live, the more you acquire. Things you want. Things you need. Things you just have to have.
Things.
We threw a lot of stuff out. An empty dumpster was full by week’s end, full of things that had once marked their life together, but in the end, they were just that. Things.
I was worried at one point. Were we hasty to dispose of so much? Would we be sorry that we had parted with the very things that had marked their lives together? In our haste to remove the layers of things, had we also removed the traces of them?
I sat on the veranda on the last day, sipping coffee and looking out at the greens of the sixth hole. The golf course that they had walked just a few years before. A storm was brewing. The clouds were dark and foreboding and there was a crack of thunder in the distance. The rain began, slowly at first and then a steady deluge until lakes began to form on the neatly manicured grass. An egret landed on the soggy green and turned towards me, as if to say goodbye. Our work was done. It was time to go home.
And that’s when I realized what I should have known all along. They were still here. They would always be here.