Monday, November 13, 2017

Inheritance

I finished my stress cleaning today.  Perhaps it wasn't a great use of day care time, but it felt good to organize Brian's drawers, to scrub Oxyclean into the grossest parts of the carpet, to vacuum out the pantry, to refill and line up the spices in the cupboard.  Now the place is at Dishes Zero and Laundry Zero. It's a peculiar kind of bliss.

When I clean, I'm reminded of my aunt telling me about my great-grandmother. "Her house was always spotless,"  Pauline said reverently. "She took a lot of pride in keeping a neat appearance."

After a pause, perhaps realizing that this description wasn't going where she wanted it to, she added, "She was a very gracious lady."

I think a lot about this great-grandmother of mine.  She was widowed when my grandfather was nine months old, after my great-grandfather took his own life.  According to the newspaper article -- strangely graphic in its detail, compared to today -- she was living with her mother-in-law at the time.   Later a great-aunt of mine pointed out that she had converted to Catholicism in order to get married.  This was 1927, after all.

I wonder if she cleaned then, to get her mind off of it, to meditate on a way to get through the turmoil while simultaneously being useful.  Did she come to clean my grandparents' house after it became painfully clear that her son inherited that same madness that drove her first husband to his grave? Did she teach my mother how to cast an eagle eye for dirt?

These are all questions I'm a little too afraid to ask. I didn't know about the full story of my grandfather's struggle with mental illness until my grandmother was dying.  It was only then that the dams burst.  I didn't have the heart to tell any of them -- my mother, my aunts, my uncle -- that their particular brand of neurotic and codependent dysfunction made total sense once I knew more about the bigger picture.

I'll never know the full story, of course. It died with my grandmother. I think she meant for it to happen that way.

It seems these matriarchs were good at cleaning the past, too.  When I asked Pauline, by far the aunt I was closest with, whether or not Grandpa was schizophrenic, the answer was a little too offended and emphatic for me to be believe it wholeheartedly.  The newspaper archives are much more blunt about the truth, though.  My grandfather was on trial for manslaughter.  A psychiatrist found him unfit to stand trial, so instead he disappeared into a mental hospital for four years.  When it happened, my grandmother had 8 children, ages 1-13.  They remember what she did to get them by.  It nearly broke them when she passed.

I did not know about this until I was 28.  I may know how to clean, but clearly I've got a lot to learn about the art of scrubbing.

Pauline, too, cleaned to quell a weary mind.  She suffered from a host of ailments -- skin cancer, lupus, and finally uterine cancer -- but I can only recall a handful of times when she wasn't cheerful. She cleaned her own house until the end -- down to the hour, in fact.  While she napped her heart gave out, tired from decades of dutiful labor under duress.  She had just finished scrubbing her kitchen floor.

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