Did They Know It Was Their Last Day?
On estate sales, immigrant workers, and learning to really see.
This one's heavy. Estate sales, my mother's last day at home, and the immigrant workers I see but maybe don't really see. I don't have answers, just questions that won't leave me alone. If it resonates, let me know. Comment, share, restack—I want to know if you're sitting with this too.
Did they know it was their last day at home?
I kept asking myself that, walking through the estate sale with its opened pack of Depends keeping no secrets on an accent chair.
They couldn’t have known, or they would have stripped the bed and emptied the pantry. They would have given the children’s books, clothes, and toys to their rightful owners.
You learn a lot about people when you walk through their homes. The biggest bedroom belonged to the couple. The second bedroom had no bed at all. Instead, it held a heavy walnut desk and organized plastic bins of baseball cards. The third bedroom, this one was special. It belonged to the beloved grandchildren. A granddaughter had come first with pink-painted walls and a white floral bureau. Almost as an after-thought, a bookshelf with two Hess trucks, Duplo blocks, and a rainbow of magnetic tiles, was the only evidence there might have been a boy in this room.
A pink cotton dress hung in the closet, ready for summer.
The Mrs. probably would have taken the time to peel the wax from the candelabra if she thought over a hundred people would walk through their house.
No one prepares you for your last day in your house. Most times you won’t wake knowing it is your last day.
My mother ran away on her last day.
That decision would change her living arrangements permanently. It wasn’t much over a week after my dad died when she decided she didn’t like her caregiver, a kind-hearted Black woman named Janice. Janice wore a wig and fake eyelashes during the day, but took them off at night. I think it confused my mom, an old white German lady, to see someone transform like that.
Or maybe it was having a black person in her home at all.
I had hired Janice to stay with my mom in the house after I went back to work. No sense uprooting someone with dementia who had already lost her life partner.
Even though Janice always locked the door, my mom’s mind wasn’t gone enough not to remember how to unlock her own back door. She walked to a neighbor’s house in the cool spring air without a coat and told them someone was keeping her against her will. I got a call at work and drove over to pick her up.
Once Mom was back home and she realized Janice wasn’t leaving, she called the police. They took my mom to the hospital for a psych evaluation, after which I transferred her to a locked dementia care facility. I couldn’t take any more chances that she might try to run away.
If my mother had known it would be her last morning to wake up in her own bed that fateful day in March 2014, would she still have run away?
Maybe the thought of a last day disturbs me because I know I will have a last day too. The rat-a-tat-tat of my neighbor’s roof brings me out of my ruminating. The temperature is in the teens this morning as I watch the Mexican roofers pull off tiles. They defy gravity as they walk the steep pitch with athleticism and grace.
How are they working in this cold?
It’s morose, but I wonder what would happen if one of them fell. He would have left home this morning, not knowing he wouldn’t be letting his dog out again.
He and his crew probably feel like that every day.
The estate sale felt tragic because those people didn’t know. But what’s more tragic? To live your whole life not knowing when it will end, or to live every day knowing the home you’ve made could be taken from you?
These men know. And we’re the ones making them know.
I’m inside my warm house selling my mother’s crystal necklaces on eBay while men risk their lives in the cold outside my window. ICE could detain and deport them any day. Men who are visible and invisible at the same time.
I see them, but do I see them?
I don’t know the answer to that. I just know the question won’t leave me alone.
You leave your reader with a heavy question about whether we really see people, and I confess my heart bleeds over this reality. I see them and served them at a food pantry. I remember all the Venezuelan young families that came to have a better life at the end of Covid, all now gone by forced deportation, fleeing to Canada or self-deporting. Not to mention all the Central American and Mexican families sent to my area for shelter and keeping, who were working and following the legal process. Every other family we served spoke Spanish (like me) and now I am rusty in the language again, no Spanish speakers are left.
The part that bothers me most is that only 5-7% of all undocumented people in those country have criminal records. What is the reason for the blanket detention of anyone standing in the way? Yes, if I sound frustrated and angry I am.
I am sorry for blabbering, Ilona, especially since you did not mean to be political here. I regret what you endured with your mom’s keeping. It must have been difficult for you. Thank you for digging deeper and allowing a space for the unseen to be seen.
Great post and great questions Ilona. I've been to estate sales... And the workers on the roof--especially now. Much to think about, but first to really see.