Cleaning Out the Refrigerator

I can't take full credit for this analogy...I read an online blog written by a woman who published a "real" magazine, and had gotten behind on the expected issue. She was apologizing for disappointing people, and trying to explain the overwhelming feelings that a person has when he/she has not fulfilled certain expectations.

I lost my father in January, 2005. My mother lived next door to my husband and me, so we looked in on her every day and made sure that she had groceries and ate regularly. We took her for doctor's appointments, paid her bills, and encouraged her to get back into her social activities, which she did for a while. After about a year, she began to deteriorate in several areas, and after a couple of falls in September, 2006, the doctor told her that she couldn't live alone any longer. She moved to our house, and we were fortunate enough to find some dependable help to assist my husband (he was retired) with her care. I continued to work, and we made plans to move into a larger house, so that my mother could have her own area, and so that we would be in a safer neighborhood.

We closed on the house on the Thursday before Halloween, 2006, and on that same day, we took my mother to live in a local nursing facility. She had been diagnosed with liver cancer, and given less than six months to live. We moved the next week, and my sister and I began an exhausting routine of working full-time jobs and trying to check on our mother at least four times a week. Mother passed away on December 2, and we began the work of settling her estate. My husband became ill on January 21, 2007, was hospitalized for nineteen days, and passed away on March 10, 2007, following a brain stem stroke.

I have struggled for the past year to get up every morning and go through my routine. I have kept my bills paid (generally on time), food in the refrigerator (most of the time), and the laundry caught up. I didn't keep up with cards I needed to send, wedding gifts I needed to buy, and paperwork I needed to complete. I let things pile up in my "life refrigerator" and the milk was ruined.

I had an upper-respiratory infection around the time of the one-year anniversary of my husband's death, and it took a toll on me. However, when I finished the antibiotics, decongestant, and cough medicine, I began to have a little energy and desire to clean out that refrigerator and stock it with good things...things that didn't have the mold of sadness and pain growing on them.

During the past month, I have done some work on my part-time business, sent sympathy cards to friends who have lost loved ones, sent "thinking of you" cards to friends who are facing their own trials, cleared up some long-standing paperwork from both parents' deaths, and made amends for a couple of things I should have done months ago. I'm on my spring break from school, and I have a list of at least six more things that I'm GOING TO GET DONE THIS WEEK. I know I'll let the refrigerator get dirty again, but maybe I'll keep it cleaned out on a more regular basis.