I’m having revelations about the past this week. More specifically, I think I’m starting to understand what it means, what purpose it serves, and what I’m going to do about it.

I think one of the big problems that my parents faced in their later years is an inability to let go of the past. I think they wallowed in it. They never learned to adapt and move on as aging adults, and I think it kept them from enjoying life fully. I think their inability to evolve negatively affected their relationships with other people and anchored them in loneliness. It also hampered their ability to create meaningful changes that could have made their last years relatively worry-free.

All of my observations about my parents now, in my dad’s last days and as my mother continues to lose her battle with Alzheimer’s, are serving a purpose: they inform my future. It would be very easy to fall into the trap my Dad inadvertently laid for me by example. I could also stay mired in the past. I could bury myself in bad childhood memories. I could choose to re-live terrible conversations with my father over and over, or harbor guilt and resentment for the rest of my days.

My dad’s recent death was a particularly startling eye-opener in that it released me from a debt. At the very fiber of my core I felt that I owed that man my allegiance to the end. Even while I knew on the surface, could actually say out loud to myself, “This relationship is toxic and does not serve me”, I still couldn’t let go of him. I couldn’t kick that relationship entirely to the curb. Did I love him? No. Did I owe him a debt of gratitude for adopting me and giving me a healthy, if not happy, childhood? Yes. In other words, I could not have abandoned him while he was still alive because the sense of duty was bone-deep. “Filial duty,” he called it, iron-willed and inflexible to the last and dismissing every attempt I made to help them in the last 15 years.

Now he’s gone. I drove to my childhood home town today, had lunch at a restaurant overlooking part of an old strip of the town, where a 7-11 used to be that had a pay phone. All the kids would use it to call home and convince their parents they weren’t up to no good. Evergreen is a place I’ve always reluctantly come back to like a dog on a tether. It’s always felt somewhat familiar, even with all the changes it’s experienced in the last 30-plus years. Now that my parents are no longer in their home, it feels like a strange place. Worse, actually. The place is like a festering wound. I hate it there. I hate the people there. I hate how drab it looks in the wintertime with its dirty roads and gray snow. I know in the forefront of my mind that it is a beautiful place, but its beauty is marred by the people I knew there and the experiences I had. I never want to go back.

And that’s just it. I never want to go back, or spend time looking backward.

I could quit my job, move to Colorado, and live in the same house in the middle of the woods in which my parents slowly wasted away. The house has been left to me. I have that opportunity now. It’s an opportunity not many people have, to live on five acres in the woods in a once-beautiful home. I’m aware of my privilege in this regard. I’m also aware that I will never do that, that I will disregard the slight tug that whispers, “What if?”

I mean, what if, indeed? What would I do, rattling around as a single person in a 3000-square foot house with a shop and a three-car garage? AT 8,200 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL? That driveway was a bitch to plow when I was a kid, do I really want to do it for the last years of my life? My dad’s hugely complicated and somewhat insane solar and water purification systems notwithstanding, am I prepared to chop enough wood to get through a winter with a wood stove and a fireplace insert? Do I really want to battle ice and snow to get to a grocery store?

I guess I could keep it as a summer residence. That would be, of course, if I could afford a winter residence.

Today, I picked up my dad’s ashes from the crematorium and brought them back to this house in the mountains.

I walked through the rooms, wondering idly how my parents spent their last years there. The wood rats are moving in, I see evidence of their passage in the dust that blankets everything and in the droppings they’ve left on floors, windowsills, beds. The house is deathly quiet. The remnants of my dad’s never-ending quest to find a ‘good’ vacuum cleaner sit in the corners; three, no four, of them. I’m not sure any of them work. Some of the furniture in the downstairs living area is gone, moved to the memory care unit in the city with them. My dad’s favorite leather chair is also in the care unit, a piece of furniture I would have considered keeping because it meant so much to him, but when I saw it today I noticed that it is broken. The house’s beautiful floor-to-ceiling living room windows stare blankly at the drab winter landscape. I’ve seen those windows bow inward a full inch during brutal windstorms on the mountainside, my mom worriedly covering up my dad’s grand piano in case one of them should suddenly implode. The piano, my dad’s pride and joy, sits silent, the blanket of dust thicker there than in many places in the house. As my dad lost dexterity in his fingers, he stopped playing piano and spent more time with his accordion. I put the urn with his ashes on a footstool next to the accordion he played up until the day he left.

There is some evidence that my dad had made an effort to downsize and pack things up. There are some half-filled boxes, a wardrobe hanger with some of my mom’s clothes that was probably supposed to go with her when they left. There are things strewn haphazardly about everywhere; books, sheet music, amazon boxes, half-put-together exercise equipment. There are a few dishes in the sink. I’m afraid to open the refrigerator. It looks like my dad was caught in an endless loop between staying in the house he loved and trying to vacate properly, in an organized fashion. Blanketing the entire space is an unmistakable aura of urgency. They had to go before one of them had a heart attack or fell down the stairs. When they left, my mom was already unable to do such basic things as make a telephone call, even from a land line. Had something happened to my dad up there, she would most likely have starved or frozen to death. Everything points to a hasty departure. I know they left against their will and in a manner my dad probably found less than dignified. I suddenly feel very sorry for him.

That house should have someone to love it as much as my Dad did. It should be filled with the voices of a happy family. Kids should love playing in the woods like I did, climbing up Turtle Rock and building dams in the little streams. I want the house, like me, to become unstuck from its past. I want a new story to overwrite its old one, to make the legacy of sadness and pain fade away in the face of new joys.

I want to pack everything up that is worth revisiting at some point and put it in storage. The rest I want to chuck in dumpsters. I want to clean the house top to bottom and sell it, as is, all crazy systems intact. I want to get rid of it fast, get it on the quickest track to people with a new vision for its future. My dad wanted me to live in the house because he had some twisted idea about me carrying on some kind of ‘family’ legacy, though as a single woman with no children I have no idea what that legacy could possibly be. Regardless of my dad’s specific wishes, I think that I am doing right by him in ensuring that the house he designed DOES have a future, and that it’s a bright one. At long last, and possibly for the first time, I’m going to make the decision for him because in this case I know best.

In what may seem like a weird intangible parallel to the house situation, I’d like to pack up my past, put a tiny bit of it in brain storage, and chuck the rest in my existential dumpster and set it on fire.

I don’t think I’ll ever come back to Evergreen after the house is sold. I don’t even feel the need to go back to Colorado. It’s fine with me if I never see that place again. That pain can be done, once and for all, made to fade away as I overwrite it with any future I can envision for myself. I’m surprised these days to find myself feeling lucky. For the first time in a long time, I feel lucky, and hopeful, and free.