How to clear your parents’ house

I kept the hankies. They were useful.

I keep seeing things about people clearing out their parents’ houses. Well, of course I do. It’s what happens to people my age. I did it seven years ago.

Here are just three of the articles that I've noticed recently. (Yes, they’re all from the Guardian, cos that’s what turns up on my Facebook. Other newspapers are available.)

• My mum has died - and every decision I make about her belongings feels wrong 
• ‘I feel like I’m cancelling out her life’: the wrenching work of clearing out a parent’s home
• ‘Under the stuff I can’t throw out is the stuff my parents couldn’t throw out’: novelist Anne Enright on the agony of clearing her family home

I’m not going to go into that much detail, or write about the emotional aspects of it. At the time it didn't feel like an existential crisis: it felt like a practical one.

Anyway, I’ve already written a blog post, the year my Mum died, called Things I’ve inherited from my mother. 

But I lied (to myself?)  when I said I’d cleared the house. I’d only started. 

It’s a few years now since I had to do it, and I still think about it sometimes. And I wish I’d done it differently. But it’s one of those things that you only do once in your life: no second chances, no chance to learn from your mistakes. I made a lot of them, and they gave me daytime nightmares for a long time. 

I’m not going to write about the emotional stuff.  I’m going to write what I wish someone had told me.

Schrodinger’s retirement

 

I have wondered in the past about whether I am ready to retire. Now it’s starting to feel as if I don’t have a choice. 

Officially I am still working. I update my business website every month. I sometimes post about work-related things on my social media (although I’m more likely these days to be posting about books and music). And I still go on LinkedIn, although I hate it.

And one day last week I went on LinkedIn and in just a few minutes I saw an ex colleague who’s been out of work for six months and is desperate for a job, and three freelances advertising their “availability”.

I have “availability” too. In the past everyone was embarrassed to admit it, because there was a stigma about not being successful. But when it’s happening to everyone, it has to be said.

I’ve been freelance, this time round, for over 12 years and I’ve always assumed I could continue for as long as I wanted. But maybe that’s no longer true.

Covid five years on: there is no "other side"

A social distancing T shirt sold during covid in aid of Age UK, modelled by a 94-year-old woman.

Suddenly everyone is reminding me that covid was five years ago.

Well, covid started (officially) five years ago. It never finished. All that talk about “see you on the other side” turned out to be optimistic. There is no other side. There’s just now, when I’m usually the only person on the bus wearing a face mask. And when I have friends who still have to self isolate and have invited me to a Facebook group called “Still hardcore coviding”. 

So, no, there is no "after covid". But there is a "before covid", and it feels like another world. What happened five years ago divides my life, and my memories. Once, we’d measure out our lives in holidays or jobs. Now, I just finding myself saying "that was before covid".

As for “during covid”, I’m revisiting it now.

Should I retire?

 

I never thought I’d ask myself that question. And now I am.

I get my state pension next year. Six years after I expected to get it, and I’m still angry with the Tories about this. But there’s nothing I can do about that. The Waspi T-shirt is in the bottom of a drawer, the movement split into factions, and no-one was listening anyway. 

Six years ago, I wouldn’t have contemplated giving up work. I felt fairly fit and healthy. Or as much as I’ve ever been, for someone who hated PE and lived mostly in their head.

It feels as if I’m being punished for that now. I’m being forced to live in my body, to be constantly aware of it. Every minute of the day, it lets me know it’s there, with constant micro-aggressions and the occasional kicking. 

How to watch your mother die

This is a bit different from my usual blog posts. I wrote it a few years ago for a writing competition (and got longlisted). 

It’s another exploration of the momentous year in which I got my autism diagnosis and my mother died. It covers both themes, because in real life things never happen in isolation. I hope you like it.

Trigger warning. Obviously.

What not to say when someone dies

There was a nice piece about Wilko Johnson in Louder than War last week, but I had to laugh at the way it got promoted on Twitter. “Wilko Johnson who sadly recently passed away,” it said. 

“Sadly passed away” isn’t very rock’n’roll, is it?

There is a perfectly good four-letter word they could have used instead. D.I.E.D. Wilko always seemed pretty down to earth so I think he would have preferred that. Also, he was a former English teacher so on that basis I also think he would have preferred that.  

We are not Victorians. We don’t need euphemisms.

Anyway, I lost one of my best friends last month. And “lost” is not a euphemism. Yes, my friend died. And now I have a loss in my life. Another one.

A not-normal year, and what to put in your Christmas cards

I’ve started writing my Christmas cards and some of them normally have letters in them. And I’m wondering: what can you say about this not-normal year that we are almost (and glad to be) finished with? For most of the recipients, I don’t even know whether 2020 has been relatively kind to them, as it has to me, or whether they have been more closely touched by the pandemic.

Looking back on 2020, there are a lot of things that made me anxious, depressed and angry. (Very angry. A lot.) I’m not going to write about them. You know what they are. You probably felt (and feel) much the same as I do.

So I am going to focus on the reasons to be cheerful (and a few ways to give back). I know I’ve been lucky so far. If you haven’t, I hope this isn’t too hard to read. 

Not a covid diary

This is the sort of thing I've been sharing on Facebook.

You probably haven’t noticed, because you’ve got your own lives, but I haven’t been here for the last three months.

I’ve been on Twitter, reporting racists. I’ve been on Facebook, joining groups for freelances who’ve lost work through the lockdown. And telling my friends, who know how shit the government is, how shit the government is.

But it didn’t feel right to be blogging. What was there to say? The small stuff is actually quite boring; the big stuff is too big to go there.

The end of the decade

Someone asked me recently what my ambitions were for 2020. “To survive,”  I said. They thought it was  a joke. It wasn’t.

Someone in my business network (!) recently wrote a blog post on their achievements in 2019. It was all about developing their business and networking and lots of “travel” (ie foreign holidays). This is not my world.

Someone on Twitter started asking people about their achievements during the decade. I hadn’t even realised it was the end of a decade. Or that “achievements” were what mattered in life.

Books I want to share: stories of ageing, music and memorable lines

I love libraries. They let me keep up with new books without overloading my bookshelves any more than they already are.

But there are always some bits I want to keep. So when I see a line I love in a book, I take a photo of it so I can remember. Some of them are too good not to share so here goes: some of the books I’ve read in October and the best bits. Coincidentally most, but not all, are about age. I hope you like them.

Days

My next door neighbour’s just had another birthday. She’s 102. I worked out she was actually alive before the end of the first World War. That’s a bit mind-boggling.

Dying Matters – funeral costs, and things I wish I'd done differently

Coffins are like wine in restaurants. Everyone buys the second-cheapest.

It’s Dying Matters Awareness Week – the idea is to get people talking about the things we don’t usually talk about – and today’s theme is “funeral costs”.

This is something I know about, as I was involved in arranging two funerals last year.

2018: the year I became a grownup

2018 was the year I finally started to feel like a grownup.

Early in the year, I turned 60. I grumbled a bit at the lack of state pension and I bought myself a “senior railcard”, which I loved and was strangely proud of: it felt like a rite of passage. That wasn’t what made me feel like a grown-up, though.

I didn’t realise how momentous the year was going to be. How much my life was going to change. How much I was going to change.

Things I’ve inherited from my mother

It’s a month now since my mum’s funeral, and in that time I have cleared her house. It meant staying in the house during the week after the funeral and every weekend after that. I didn’t mind: after living there during mum’s final illness it was feeling more like home than my own house. My safe space.

My sisters didn’t want to come back (in the end, one did and one didn’t). I always did. And I found that going through mum’s stuff made me feel close to her. Not the personal stuff that you’d imagine. The clutter.

Hurray! I am #ActuallyAutistic

Do you remember the summer you did your O Levels? Going on holiday knowing that there would be news when you got home, not knowing which way it would go or how it might change your life.

That was me in the mid-70s, in a dreary holiday camp somewhere in Norfolk. Me and my sisters, spending our lunch money on cigarettes and Walnut Whips and waiting for the evening when we could go to the disco and dance to KC and the Sunshine Band and get chatted up by unsuitable older men. And always at the back of my mind, the results waiting for me at home.

That was me again this summer, in a lovely seaside town on the south coast of England. Me and my husband, spending our lunch money on ice cream and waiting for the evening when it would stop being so hot. And at the back of my mind, the results. And I’m not talking about the World Cup.

The week before we went away, I had an assessment for autism. I knew I would get the result when I got back. And I knew I wanted it to be positive, because if it wasn’t I’d have to go back to the drawing board and find another reason for being weird.

The wrong New Year resolutions

It’s the end of the year, and blog posts are infecting the internet with words like “mindset”: the answer, apparently, to being healthier, richer and more successful next year. I gave up New Year’s resolutions years ago so I’m shrugging off the advice as nothing more than an excuse for a bit of buzzword bingo.

But there are some things I can’t shrug off.

2016. So much to answer for.

A Facebook meme just turned up on a friend’s post: “Guess who’s still alive in 2016? Keith f****ing Richards.” I fought the temptation to comment: “There are still four days left.”

The depression form

Have you ever filled in the depression form? It’s the one you have to do before anyone will help you with emotional problems on the NHS.

Something happened earlier this year that made me unbearably unhappy. And before anyone would help, I had to tick boxes to prove I was depressed.

January is the cruellest month (Hymn for the Dudes)

When it’s New Year’s Eve, everyone says “Thank goodness that year is over”. I didn’t say that this time round, because 2015 was an OK year for me. But it’s gone downhill ever since.

I started January discovering I couldn’t afford to move house, and ended the month accidentally falling out with one of the people I love the most. That’s on top of the normal seasonal angst.

I have a note at the bottom of my Christmas card list. It says “You will be depressed on 27th December. Do something nice.”  I love Christmas, but when it’s over I start thinking too much, and reading articles like this one.

And then there was January 2016, and the Grim Reaper got the wrong list.

Melancholy and middle-age

One of my Twitter friends asked recently: “Is everything slightly melancholy after you reach a certain age?”

Most of the people who replied said yes.