Five years of built up dust coats my throat and hands. Repressed memories of Mom’s illness rise to the front of my mind as I throw her slippers in the giveaway pile. I hate slippers now; as she got sicker, her feet and ankles swelled and she couldn’t wear anything but slippers. I remember my mother’s body swollen with tumors when I see slippers.

A ridiculous supply of knick-knacks, each with a special memory attached, wind up in the rejects as well. Most of her clothes go. We’ll eventually get rid of the bookshelves and the shoe bench. We’re not even half done sorting through her things and I can’t take anymore. Neither can my brother.

Somehow we get through the long weekend of painful memories. Somehow we don’t fight and we don’t cry and we don’t break.

It’s one of the most pathetic experiences in life; all of my mom’s vivacity, strength of will and intelligence are gone, leaving nothing but a seemingly endless pile of boxes five years later. Dad’s pile is worse. Instead of a pile of belongings, he died with nothing but the contents of his pick up truck. No furniture, no clothing. No real mark of who he was.

Dad planned his death. He made a conscious decision to get rid of his things, to leave us behind.

I’ll be watching a movie and the most ridiculously over-acted scene involving death or illness break me down to tears. Some girl will be eating lunch with her dad as he glows with pride. I want that back. I am tired of sorting through the remains of people’s lives. I don’t want to read any more wills, I don’t want to think about Power of Attorney and I don’t want to see anybody in a hospital bed.

I can’t get the images of my mom sick out of my head. The way she didn’t seem to know me in the end. I was terrified of her. Her personality completely gone, drowned out by pain and cancer.

In five months she went from a persistent stomach ache and a couple tumors in her liver to tumors everywhere. Cancer sucks, and neuroendocrine cancer sucks particularly hard. Seriously, Google it. She had the fast-growing kind.

There isn’t some magic cure for grief. But grief becomes less noticeable. The edges of the hole start to heal and we learn to live with the wounds. I can go all day without thinking about my parents. I don’t sit around every day imagining what life would be with them still alive. I don’t fixate every other second on what should have been.

It helps to focus on what I still have. I have the most amazing husband, I have an awesome brother, I have a loving (if crazy) family and I have good friends. The good thing about grief is that it gets easier and leaves us with a greater appreciation for what we have and what we can still do in our lives.