by Liz Phair
By the time I’m finished purging, half my previous wardrobe is gone. What I keep looks great on the hangers, the racks spacious and sleek, like an art installation. Decluttering feels like rebirth, as if I’m inviting in the future rather than dwelling on the past. I’m scared of winding up as an eccentric old lady living alone in a big dusty house. I deliberately sought out a life in which I would never feel lonely or isolated. I work in a hectic, crowded environment. Yet when I go home and there’s no one there, the empty rooms feel even lonelier in contrast. Sometimes I can see that old lady in the mirror looking back at me, waiting for her chance to burst out.
My friend Mallory had to clean out her grandmother’s apartment after she died. Mallory’s mother was undergoing chemotherapy in another state and couldn’t expose her fragile immune system to a flight. Mallory drove down from Winnetka to Evanston every day for a week and bagged up all her grandmother’s mementos and keepsakes, her costume jewelry, books, letters, and clothing. She kept a porcelain jewelry box and some dishes, setting aside some other sentimental items for the rest of the family to choose from, but nobody wanted very much. At the end of the process she had to leave her grandmother’s whole life, essentially, out in the hallway in bin bags, like so much trash for the garbage truck.
She sobbed as she drove home that Friday night, helpless to shield herself from the realization that this could happen to her one day. All the objects she’d gathered around her, everything she cherished, all this stuff she’d accumulated over the course of a lifetime, was essentially meaningless.
“I saw myself, Liz,” she wailed on the phone as she was driving. “I saw us as old ladies with a bunch of crap that nobody wants. Olivia, Adam, Paloma, and Nick are going to have to shovel all our belongings into trash bags and throw them out someday. I don’t want to have things anymore! I don’t want to buy anything, and I don’t want to own anything. I don’t want any material possessions at all. I want to go somewhere really beautiful and live in a tent.
She’d looked into the abyss, and now she couldn’t turn away from the nothingness we all become in the end. For a while, she felt like everything she did was a struggle against the headwind of her own insignificance. Roman emperors carved their names into everything. Pharaohs commissioned monuments. Presidents have their libraries. Everybody’s afraid of annihilation. And whether you walk toward it or run away from it as far and as fast as possible, it’s coming for you.
I watched an incredible movie called Ruth’s Journey about a wealthy woman whose life was ruined because of her attachment to things. Her granddaughter, a young woman from the North Shore of Chicago named Melinda Roenisch, wrote and directed the documentary. Ruth had once been an attractive, outgoing woman who married happily and raised a loving family. She began buying antiques as a hobby, a way to occupy herself while accompanying her husband on business trips. She’d been born into good taste, and supplemented it with further education. She loved to sift through rural estate sales looking for undiscovered treasures. Soon, she was known and respected as a savvy collector.
But in her old age, after her husband passed away and her children were busy with families of their own—deprived of stimulation and suffering from the early symptoms of dementia—she clung to her objects like a life raft, cleaning them obsessively, jealously guarding them when anyone entered the house. It became her all-consuming passion to catalog and count her precious artifacts. Soon, she shunned visits from her family for fear that they might break something. She followed the maids around like a shadow, occasionally accusing them of mishandling important pieces. Several quit under the strain.
I think about the pleasure I get from arranging my closet; how I like to return to look at it several times in the evening. I imagine Ruth wandering her halls, touching and shifting her antiques slightly to the right or left. Moving a piece to a different room. Changing her mind and returning it to its original place. It must have felt like a puzzle she could never solve; like striving for an elusive perfection. She wouldn’t leave the house for fear someone might break in and rob her. She lived in a grand mansion overlooking Lake Michigan, but she was essentially a prisoner of her mental illness. It was hard to say which came first, the hoarding instinct or the pressure of owning so many valuables.
After she died, her grown children had no interest in preserving her collection. It had become a symbol of what had separated her from them. Some vases and historically significant furniture were donated to museums, but the bulk of her estate was sold at auction, mostly in large lots. It was the only way to remove such an enormous cache of personal effects at once. The dealers and collectors gathered in the living room, surrounded by her massive inventory. Everything you could think of as being of use in a household was present in triplicate: silverware, table settings, chairs, sofas, fire irons, table lamps, oil paintings, vases, pedestals, breakfronts, carpets, kitchenware. There was barely any room to move in the house, no quiet place for the eye to land. Her collection was madness materialized—a portrait of a sick woman who tried to heal herself with beautiful things.
It was hard to watch the auction. The spectacle of someone who had lived so privately being exposed in such a public way was painful, like seeing a dignified old lady stripped naked and paraded through the village. Even after she was gone, her objects told the story of her loneliness. It didn’t take long before the grand house was emptied of every last belonging as the parasites picked clean the bones of her corpse. All her time, effort, discernment, and devotion had been converted instantly into cash. All the hundreds of Saturdays spent traveling to sales, all the time she spent perfecting her haggling skills, all her dedication to completing those cup and saucer sets—all for nothing. Her life’s work had been undone in an afternoon.
In the documentary, Roenisch takes us through the empty house one last time, passing from room to barren room. The sun, streaming through curtainless windows, exposes ripped-up floors. Workmen in cranes and bulldozers remove the fireplaces, doorframes, decorative lintels, and garden statuary to be sold, too, until the house itself is an uninhabitable ruin. The metaphor is so heavy with implications for our society that it physically hurts. You feel like you’re watching violence, but it’s only the natural order of life here on earth, which we’re constantly fighting. The body dies, the body decays, eventually nothing remains. Lover, beware! Be careful of clinging too tightly to anything that isn’t eternal lest you lose everything in your quest to keep it.
When my beloved grandmother Winnie began to fade, I didn’t want to face what was happening to her. In the beginning, I ignored her limitations. I identified with her deeply, and what was happening to her felt very threatening to me. I used to look at senior citizens as if they were frozen in time at whatever age they happened to be, but after watching Winnie deteriorate both mentally and physically, I saw older adults as being on a slow, inexorable slide into oblivion. I could no longer be around them without thinking about the process.
I worked as an art therapist at my father’s hospital one summer during college. I loved commuting downtown with him in the mornings. It was exciting to see what his life outside our home was like. As we crawled along through rush-hour traffic, we played a game where I would select a sports car to follow and he would try to keep up with it. Nobody was moving very fast, so our maneuvers weren’t dangerous, but I would cajole Dad into switching lanes and passing cars to keep our “team leader” in view. I think he enjoyed getting a little wild and crazy, too. It reminded him of his youth. With Lake Michigan changing colors on our left and the Chicago skyline looming, the windows of the skyscrapers glinting pink in the dusty haze of dawn, we raced at a snail’s pace, and I cheered every time Pops snuck his way around another one of the lethargic commuters.
We’d part company as soon as we arrived at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. I was assigned to different wards throughout the week, rotating between substance abusers, girls with eating disorders, pediatr
ic patients, psychiatric patients, and the geriatric population. I was exposed to a lot of disruptive and unsettling behavior, but nothing depressed me like the aging. They had so little energy. A lot of them looked like they’d given up on life already. I tried to interest them in painting, drawing, or making collages, but it was hard for them to hold the brushes, pencils, and scissors. When I thought about their options, I just felt hopeless.
I vowed that I would never die in a hospital. I would get eaten by a shark or killed by a bear, thrown off a cliff or drown in the ocean, but I definitely wouldn’t wither away in the sterile, cheerless atmosphere I witnessed there. Later, I didn’t want that for Winnie, either. My experiences with her were so rooted in nature, in gardening and the ocean. It killed me to see her move into a nursing home. When I was growing up, she was always by my side pointing out a delicate flower I’d missed in the grass, or a rare seashell tumbling in the surf beneath my feet. She was so observant. We would sit on the dock in Clearwater, Florida, and gaze into the green water until we could make out sparkling fish lurking beneath the planks. It felt to me like she was always making wonderful things appear as if by magic, but what she was really doing was teaching me how to see. Mystery is all around us, she explained, but it’s hiding.
Right before I released my first album, I went with my parents to visit Winnie at her retirement home in Cincinnati. Things were coalescing in my career, finally. Under the moniker Girly-Sound, I had recorded a cassette tape of songs that had caught on in the underground music scene. I had an offer from Matador Records in New York, which was a dream come true on paper, but nothing in my personal life had significantly changed. I was frustrated, waiting for something to happen, and needed money. I was hungry to be recognized, and also worried about performing my songs live. I’d never been onstage before. Everyone was telling me I should start playing out, but I had terrible stage fright. I needed to be visible in the music scene, to connect with the community of songwriters who were as ambitious and striving as I was. The last thing I wanted to do was hang out with a bunch of older adults who were no longer working and had spent all their drive.
I was a brat. My parents didn’t know anything about my life at the time, and they couldn’t understand why I was behaving so badly. We stopped at a Starbucks on the way to the nursing home, and I kicked the wall because I felt like no one was listening to me. Then I walked outside and smoked a cigarette in plain view of my parents, who sat in stunned silence—no doubt imagining the kind of life I’d led in San Francisco. They’d never seen this side of my personality, and it frightened them. My mom didn’t even mention the cigarette when I came back inside, which meant we were at DEFCON 2. In fact, they said nothing at all. My mother looked at me archly, as if to communicate: We are going to see my mother. Pull it together, young lady, or there will be consequences.
I couldn’t explain that every nerve in my body was screaming, Run, run, run! I was having an anxiety attack, but I wasn’t mature enough to articulate it. From her point of view there was nothing for me to resent about our visit apart from its inconvenience. It hurt her deeply to think that I wouldn’t repay Winnie’s devotion to me for all those years. She didn’t understand that it killed me to see my grandmother like this; that it felt like being complicit in her death, in a way that I wasn’t prepared for. In my mind, it was a lie to smile and pretend that everything was all right, to persuade her that she should be happy living here when, if it were me, I’d want my family to break me out and take me as far away from this death factory as possible.
We sat in Winnie’s lovely apartment eating hors d’oeuvres and sipping cocktails. It was about 108 degrees in the retirement home. We’d peeled off our sweaters, unbuttoned our collars, and rolled up our sleeves. Winnie had her feet up on an ottoman and a cashmere blanket spread across her lap. I was dizzy from the heat and the way the sound was dampened by the plush wall-to-wall carpeting and chintz upholstery. Every once in a while, one of the caretakers popped her head in the door to get a look at us. They wanted us to know that they loved Winnie, and to say how popular she was on this floor. Each one of them seemed to think they were her favorite. It didn’t surprise me. But I wondered if she had any real friends in this nursing home anymore. Two of the women she moved there to be close to had died—one recently. There was a little condolence wreath tacked to the woman’s door.
Winnie saw me looking bored. She pointed to the window and said, “Look, Elizabeth.” She had that familiar twinkle in her eye.
I got up and peered out into the blue night. Snow had started falling; big, fluffy clumps of it. “Can I go outside for a bit?” I asked. “I want to be in the snow.”
My mother frowned. She probably thought I was going outside to smoke.
“Yes,” Winnie said. “That’s a good idea.” She nodded, encouraging me.
“Just don’t go too far,” my father warned. He thought I was going out for a cigarette, too, and probably wished he could join me.
Downstairs, the residents in the main lounge watched as I walked out the front door, their eyes eagerly following everything around them. I wished I could restore their strength and lead them like a troop of scouts, out into the brisk azure evening.
Once I was in the fresh air, I felt better. It wasn’t too cold. I could see a path going around the side of the building, which looked like a good place to light up. I followed the cement tiles into the shadows, stepping gingerly, dodging cobwebs. I leaned against the brick wall and sparked up a Camel Light. Tilting my head, I blew the smoke up toward the trees, feeling like Lauren Bacall: all hips and elbows.
Winnie’s nursing home sat at the edge of a steep ravine, just like the one I grew up playing in on Interwood Avenue. I decided to scramble down to the bottom and check out the white ribbon of frozen water meandering along the ravine floor. It looked magical under the moonlight, like a fairy-tale illustration. The ground was harder than I’d anticipated, covered in a layer of ice, and I fell and slid most of the way down, snagging my dress pants on the underbrush. Great, I thought. Now I’ll never get back up. A dog in one of the houses on the far side of the ravine started barking.
I stood up and brushed myself off, admiring my new perspective. I tested the frozen stream with my toe. I could feel the pressure cracking the waxy surface, see the black water sloshing below the crust. I could have been five years old again, playing in the woods behind Winnie and Granddad’s house. I needed to believe that the past was not gone forever, that even when Winnie died, we’d all get another chance to be together, to do it all over again somehow.
I was staring into the distance, looking at the cheery lights in the houses across the way, when I heard twigs breaking and footsteps trudging through the snow on the slope behind me. I spun around to see a herd of deer walking slowly through the forest. It was a mother and two juveniles. They were traversing the hill on a secret path that had been invisible to me, halfway between Winnie’s building and where I was standing, down in the cut. I held my breath as they got closer, unsure if they were aware I was there, not wanting to startle them. They plodded along, the snow accumulating on their shoulders—the epitome of sure-footed grace. I couldn’t believe I was within spitting distance of these wild creatures. They were so big and soulful. Normally, I only saw deer when they also saw me, or when they were on TV. This was like standing in line behind a movie star at a coffee shop in L.A. You got a totally different sense of the person whom you thought you already knew so well.
Winnie died ten years later. We watched her slip away by degrees. First, she lost her mobility, then she was plagued by confusion, then it was breast cancer, then it was Alzheimer’s. She’d outlived three husbands, and had a full life until her last decade. I got a call from her care facility while I was eating Easter brunch at a friend’s house.
The nurse was a poor communicator. She said Winnie had pneumonia, and she was going to pass away shortly. “I’ve seen a lot of them lik
e this,” she said. “She doesn’t have long.”
I thought, What the hell are you doing saying that in front of her? I was irritated. I heard her say, in her Ohio Valley drawl, “Winnie? It’s your granddaughter. It’s Elizabeth. Say hi.” Then, to me, “Well, go ahead, honey. Tell her that you love her.”
She put the phone up to Winnie’s ear, and I could hear my grandmother’s raspy breathing over the phone. I started saying whatever popped into my mind; just stupid stuff, like “How are you? I love you. Can you hear me?” She didn’t respond. I finally realized she was unconscious.
I took the first flight I could get and made it to the nursing home before any other family members arrived. I had some cousins in the area who visited Winnie regularly, but this acute crisis took us all by surprise. We’d gotten used to her slow, steady decline, and now everything was happening quickly. No matter how long you anticipate it, I don’t think you’re ever ready for the finality of death. The no-more-chances of it.
My parents weren’t due until later, so I had Winnie to myself for a couple of hours, just the two of us in a room alone. I had no idea what to do for somebody who was dying, so I got some lotion and started massaging her hands and legs, conversing with her like a chatty masseuse. I recounted all my favorite memories of her, describing the great times we’d spent together. I recalled the way the women in our family stayed up until 3:00 A.M. on Christmas Eve, sipping sherry and wrapping presents until the fire died out. I reminded her of the time in Clearwater, Florida, when I tried to save the lobsters she was getting ready to cook by throwing them back into the ocean with their claws still pegged. I talked about the tractor rides, and the sunflowers she grew, and our amazing Fourth of July celebrations when my uncle and my dad turned into pyromaniacs for the day.