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Healing from Perpetual Caregiving in the Wake of My Father’s Death

It’s time to shift from selfless to self-full

Y.L. Wolfe
Middle-Pause

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Photo By: Kaboompics.com via Pexels

It was a cool day in early November when I drove to Home Depot and bought several gallons of paint. I’ve had a list of home improvements that has grown over the years, and I found myself seized that day by the determination to complete one major item on that list: painting and organizing the garage.

My garage has always been a metaphorical black hole filled with possessions that don’t fit into my very tiny house (600 square feet) and all those random items that we never know if we should keep or discard (i.e. 57 Allen wrenches of various sizes).

Over the past seven years, it also became a landing pad for my father’s slow shedding of possessions. Every few weeks, I’d arrive home after a visit with him with a box or two of items he didn’t want or need anymore. There were things I saved for my siblings, things I gave to Goodwill, things to file away in my family keepsake box, and things I honestly didn’t know what to do with.

I wanted to organize all of this once and for all, ideally with wall-mounted shelving units, but I also wanted the space to look cleaner — which meant painting over the ugly, exposed drywall.

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