Do Not Throw Out the Boat, the Knit Tit, or the Unicycling Sailor

          To avoid distressing my parents, their live-in caregiver and I decide to search for the hearing aids in their old bedroom while my father’s snoozing in his armchair and my mother’s hooked up to her TV, her frail head squashed between enormous headphones. Halfway through COVID, getting upstairs became impossible, so my parents now sleep on the ground floor of their house.

          Both sets of hearing aids disappeared in lockdown chaos. My mother’s a good lip-reader, but face masks frustrate that trick, and it’s hard to have even a simple conversation with her. She’s retreated into the BBC News, Strictly Come Dancing, and Escape to the Country, jerking a finger at any masked person who approaches her. “I can’t hear you. Take that damned thing off!”

          And without his hearing aids, my father has capitulated to silence. This titan of conversation, reciter and writer of poetry, possessor of a hearty baritone voice, has lost his language since I last saw him two years ago. He sits vacantly in the kitchen, watching the caregiver, Simi, at work. I imagine his damaged brain as a barren landscape gashed by canyons which sever his thoughts from his words. Without being able to hear, he cannot bridge the dark scars.

          Most distressing since I arrived in England from my home in Canada a few days ago, I can’t be sure he knows who I am. Call me selfish, because my father is clean, shaved, fed, safe, calm, but I must find the hearing aids and restore his speech somehow. I need to hear my father say my name.

          Simi is giving up her free afternoon to do this, and I’m impressed. I’d want to escape the house and relax if I were her. She’s had a tough job, looking after two nonagenarians with dementia for the last six months. We’ve just met, and we’re still adjusting as we sort out who takes care of what.

          I’m wary, concerned about bringing out private items in front of a near stranger. Simi fizzes with purpose, a sprinter on the start line, braced for the gun. She wants to free up some space for the packages of adult diapers cluttering the hallway. Judging by the immaculateness of the house under her care, the young woman values order and cleanliness.

          In my parents’ old bedroom, everything’s muffled by absence. We begin with the dresser, and the caregiver starts on a full purge, not just a rummage through the contents of the room in the hope of finding the hearing aids. She holds up some ancient underwear excavated from the top drawer.

          “Out,” I say.

          Stiff white shirt collars at least seventy years old.

          “Out.” We’re on a roll; this is easy.

          Five boxes of brand-new cotton handkerchiefs.

          “Keep.” Simi frowns. “Probably gifts,” I insist. “We’d better keep them.”

          So we continue. Dust being shaken out of my mother’s yellow silk dressing gown clouds the air. “Donate,” I say. She’s not a silk-dressing-gown wearer anymore. Or wait—is it wrong to discount her wanting to be elegant again? This is torturous. No. Best to donate.

          The caregiver lays out five single earrings in a line and opens her hand, questioning.

          “Keep. We’ll find the matching ones.”

          Simi looks sceptical, but complies.

          “What’s this?” Simi extracts a bag with a breast prosthesis. She pulls out the “knit tit” which I ordered for my mother after her left-side mastectomy at age seventy-five, hand-knitted in cashmere wool. The maker embedded a stone in the prosthesis so it would weigh the same as a breast. I selected a granite stone from a beach near my home in Nova Scotia, Canada, so my mother could have a piece of her homeland next to her heart.

          “You don’t know what that is? My mother doesn’t wear one in her bra?” I ask.

          “No, I’ve never seen one,” Simi says. “I just give her the clothes; she dresses herself.”

          True, and it’s good my mother can dress independently at age ninety-three. No reason she should wear a prosthesis. But it signals decline. A hitch hooks in my heart to see my mother’s breast orphaned in Simi’s hand. The prosthesis is an intimate item, and I know my mother would not want to see it being held by the young woman. She vehemently opposed having a caregiver in her house, and she still refuses personal hygiene help from Simi. Also clear: She doesn’t want anyone other than a family member in the old bedroom, which had been a refuge as infirmity and isolation shrank her world. We’re violating her wishes in multiple ways.

          I take the knit tit from Simi—holding the weight of decision for a beat—and sense the heaviness within the soft wool in my palm. Mid-swing to place the prosthesis in a garbage bag, I stop, tug it out, and tuck it back into my mother’s drawer.

          “Keep,” I say. My task mate shrugs, perplexed.

          Simi convinces me to donate all the shoes. Neither parent can get their swollen feet into them anymore. But my mother and father are not shuffling slipper-people. They are good leather, sensible-shoe people. That their caregiver has only known them as slipper-wearers bothers me. A hot impetus to restore my parents’ dignity flares up my sternum. Add to my to-do list: Source proper footwear for both.

          I’m thinking about shoes when Simi lets out a triumphant “Ha!” and shoves in the last drawer. Then she turns to me, still energetic.

          “Now, the shelves!”

          It’s cathartic getting rid of stuff, and I’m happy to be bossed a little. Though there’s a responsibility I bear which doesn’t burden the caregiver. What if we throw away something precious, irretrievable?

          When we’re finished, no hearing aids, but ten bags are lined up for the charity store. I go back through each one, take out a couple of items, and replace them on the shelves. A model boat my father made with my older sister. A ridiculous toilet roll dispenser featuring a ship captain peering through a telescope while riding a unicycle. As you pull the toilet roll, the wheel circles. This was a gift from my mother to my father, the latter being the unusual combination of a sailor and a unicyclist. When she discovered it in a catalogue, crying with laughter, she said, “Oh, oh, I don’t believe it. Perfect!” My father’s jaunty red unicycle is still propped by the front door. He rode it down to the village shop every morning to get the newspaper until his mid-eighties.

          Simi looks sideways at the bric-a-brac and shakes her head. I can’t explain its importance, how the boat’s streaky paint represents the rare moments my siblings and I had with our father when he was home from his postings as a naval officer. And I can’t describe to Simi my mother’s glee as she sat on the edge of my father’s armchair while he unwrapped her Christmas gift. I’d have to convey the whole of my parents’ sixty-five-year marriage to someone who has very little context. Instead, I tape notes to the selected items:

          DO NOT THROW OUT

          We hustle the charity bags to the car, and Simi slams down the hatchback and claps her hands together to remove the dust. “That’s better, no?” she asks. Yes, better, though a snake of deceit coils within me. If my parents were healthy, I’d never rifle through their things and clear out their stuff without permission.

          We extract both sets of hearing aids a few weeks later from the drinks cabinet, nestled between crystal glasses and cans of out-of-date beer. My mother rips them from her ears, declaring they hurt and squeal, the damned things. She reaches for the TV headphones like a baby for a bottle and suckles her favourite programs. My father sits compliantly while I fiddle his devices into place.

          A month later, when it’s time to leave, I will receive the gift of hearing my father say my name. He’ll stand at the front door in his new leather shoes and wave goodbye. Just as he always used to, he’ll peer down the street, check for oncoming traffic, and signal that it’s safe to drive round the blind corner.

          A year later, when we empty the house following the second funeral in three months, I will become blasé about disposing of my parents’ possessions. No more torturous decisions: There is too much stuff, and now I value memories more than things. My older sister will take the toy boat. The freewheeling sailor will continue dispensing toilet paper in my younger sister’s bathroom.

          I will lose track of the knit tit. It was probably thrown out, but that’s okay. The pure wool will decompose, like any other carbon-based matter. The granite stone, which absorbed my mother’s heartbeat, will be here millennia more; it doesn’t matter where or how the earth accepts its return.