Practical progress is very encouraging

My brother in law (my sister’s husband) John and my niece, Jennifer are here with me for a few days. They are both good listeners but what they really like to do is help out in practical ways. My sister, Nancy, who was here for Jackie’s Memorial Celebration calls them her, “work team”. I had a few clean up projects in mind before they came and they have enthusiastically found more. Not cleaning up sentimental things, not Jackie’s things – not those things. I feel no rush to do those things and when I do, I’ll be communicating with Paulette and Gayle. No, this is things like organizing, cleaning the freezer, the refrigerator, the pantry closet, the part of the garage where I have just been dumping things for 5 months, helping return various disability appliances we had borrowed, weeding and trimming outside. Jennifer is even cooking an abundance of food with an eye toward freezing some plates of food for me. All of this activity is very encouraging as I look around at areas that I knew needed attention but didn’t seem to have the energy yet to tackle them.

Some have asked, ‘so what are you going to do now?; Nothing so differently really. I live here, love this house, have great friends through our church and have a nice job. What I am going to do is slowly move through this house and remove all of the clutter we have accumulated – we always talked about that. I’ll start with the non-threatening areas like the garage and my office, then the attic and eventually to all the other areas. But there is no timetable, no “shoulds” on removing Jackie’s personal items. I may even keep some of these things around for quite awhile. We’ll see. I feel no pressure about that. But I do want the house to be clean and minimalist and I don’t want to have to leave all this clutter to someone else to deal with.

Perhaps the lesson in all of this for me after the "work team" is gone is that practical progress is very encouraging, even healing. If I can just do a little bit every day then I can look back and feel good about not being so out of control and overwhelmed.