“Here, take a bag,” my dad said to me, “put anything in here you think can be donated.”
I visited Aunt Jacquiee’s vacant house with my parents to hollow it out for whoever would live in it next. It was a strange feeling to be inside. The pictures of lighthouses and English Royalty still peppered the walls, and the scent of musty antiques was fighting to take over the smell of my clothes, just as it always had. Her former bird’s cage cornered the living room with a grim picture of him placed inside.
When Aunt Jacquie died, it was sort of a God send; she wasn’t sick, but she had an illness. You could tell she suffered up until that night when she went to sleep and decided not to leave the oneiric landscape of her dreams. She had accidentally killed her bird, Bill, a beloved blue cockatoo, about a week before she passed herself. I asked my mom about it as she continued rummaging through the house. She said:
“She had the usual family gathering one night. We roasted chestnuts like we lived in the 1800s and did all of the other wacky things that we typically did at her house. Dan brought his girlfriend with him, and she didn’t believe that Jacquie could fit both of her feet behind her head, so she set out to prove it. She went to sit on a chair, but Bill was sitting there too. All we heard was a ‘squawk,’ and all we saw left was a flattened, wiry carcass. I don’t know if it was Bill or Aunt Jacquie that screamed.”
That was just like her, though. She was that eccentric person you meet once in your lifetime, or that movie character you see only on screen. At seventy-five, she never had her ears pierced, but had hundreds of pairs of exorbitant and colorful clip-on’s to match every one of her outfits. She had a rustic and raspy voice without smoking a single cigarette in her life, she plastered the walls with pictures of Princess Diana and Nantucket, and she insisted that every child that visited leave with one of her diabetic lollipops (I wasn‘t mad at her for that). In all of her idiosyncrasies, though, I remembered her most for her red pea coat. She wore it almost every day of her life, no matter how bristling hot it was.
My mom said, “She loved Bill. Loved him like he was her boyfriend.”
“I don’t think she really understood that Bill was just an animal,” said my dad, “All it wanted to do was survive. People are a lot more complex than that; a bird can be replaced so easily.”
I took the black bag in my hand and slumped through the living room, hoping that there would be nothing salvageable. There was a lot of paper, some letters and envelopes, books with box-loads of tissues for bookmarks, but mostly blank paper. I came across her pea-coat, glowing bright red in the sunlight that streamed through the shaded windows. It was in perfect condition without a blemish or tear in sight.
Equipped with plastic gloves, my dad carried a garbage bag, winnowing through the clutter splayed throughout the hollow house.
“Where do you want trash?” I asked my dad. He pointed to a bag sitting in the kitchen. I came to the pea coat and picked it up, sending whirls of dust off dancing into the natural light from the window. I put it in a bag, knowing that it would have a better life in a heap than on a body where it would fade into a dull, lifeless red.
