Sitting At My Parents' House

It's not my childhood home. It's not a home in which I ever lived. It is the home of my parents, a home they paid off, and where they have lived a very long time. It is a home where I've slept many a night, where I brought home my then-boyfriend/now-husband of many years, and our little brother. It is a home where their grandchildren have spent days and nights. The essence of my father and their life is everywhere. His room filled with his hobbies smells of him and the fabrics and materials of his hobbies. I understand completely why his recliner remains in it's place. Why his dresser is mostly untouched. I've certainly left the things in our boy's room much as it was, only minor changes. - Regrettably it is true, changes he would not mind if he came home, changes that would not throw him off if he walked in without the light on. - I have a lot of trouble with this, and far more than my remaining 2 weeks of therapy can successfully address - My father's cremains are in a beautiful wood box sitting on his dresser. The bedroom smells of him, his powders and lotions, his breath mints. The box for the remains was a gift from my mother in law. It was important to her when Daddy died that she offer something to my mother, whom she has never met. So I described what Mom wanted and his sister, a professional in the funeral home industry, found it and shipped it within that week. It is a lovely cherry wood box. It looks expensive yet plain and simple. A plain wood box. Polished. Inside the box, I had Charles set two small bags, tea bags really, each with a spoonful of soil. Soil is a fancy word for dirt isn't. One spoonful is from my aunt's yard, which represents the Mississippi county where he grew up. I thought it a bit much to ask them to go to the now-gas station where he grew up, and I figured that so much dirt word and landscaping had been done that such would not truly reveal dirt from his youth. So I settled on a simple request of just a bag of dirt from their yard, from the county. The other teabag has dirt from the side yard where he raised us, where we grew up. Our little cul de sac neighborhood. The neighborhood has changed. Houses burned out, empty, boarded up. Houses that are rentals. Our house is a rental now. It was empty that day, which made it easier to step into the yard with a garden trowel and dig a ziploc bag of dirt. Placed in tea bags I asked Charles to put them in the polished wood box with him. The whole of it sits on his dresser. A month ago when I took Mom to visit her sisters, my brother had to come get the box and keep it safe while she travelled. I mean, we could have taken him with us. She didn't ask. I may not have ever even known if she had. But my brother knew. He always does. He somehow always knows what she wants. So last night I sat again on the bed that was never mind and I practiced sitting in my uncomfortableness. Practiced remembering the living were there - my brother and his wife, his children and a new fiance, my mom, my husband and myself. We were all there, we were living. I was uncomfortable. In my head I reminded myself it was OK. I went back to the dining room.