Standing In A Field of Poppy's ...Stuff

[wackdaddy]

Because my usual lunch partner was on vacation this week, I pieced together an actual full-length LJ entry instead of mindlessly Googling things while I ate my PBJ and carrots!My father-in-law finally moved in with us July 21st

Comments

[marsidotes]

Great post honey, mostly accurate but there are a few things you're not aware of. That razor he finally got rid of and only because it fell apart..........they were married in 1940. That makes it a genuine "antique" at 67 years old. You know I tell him that he is the only "antique", all the rest of the stuff is junk.

Did I tell you that the day he moved into his new bedroom, as we were opening boxes, I showed him my brass and porcelain bedroom lamps, he liked them because they matched his brass headboard. Within a couple of days he decided that because they were in his room, they should be his and I should get his old bedroom lamps, again from Wal Mart, or K-mart, because as he put it, since mine are in his room, they should be his because he wants everything in his rooms to belong to him. I told him I can just take them back if that's how he feels. Just to set the record straight.

[sweetmeow]

I cannot believe the stress that this must be bringing to you. To control a packrat -- if that is even possible -- is not easy. I can't imagine how difficult it must have been to clean out his house so he could move!

I'm convinced that some older people really do get way too attached to their "things". It's their substitute for relationships they have lost to death, and the life they cannot lead anymore due to their age. The older Ray's father got, the more attached he got to his things he's collected over the years. He also had an inflated sense of value of those things, too. He's now in a nursing home and is so out of it, he's confused about his things now -- but in his dementia haze, often refers to many of his "antiques".

I took the liberty of reading Ray this entry. He laughed, and said that Mary Ann's father's hoarding tendency is his own father "on steroids"! *ggg*

*sigh*

We gotta get together! :)

[righteous_chops]

Hey, found you through fortysomething and then through myhappyhome, just so you know.

Um, wow. I know damn well I could not do what you're doing and I think you are a saint for doing so. That's a sweet story, though. It's interesting to see what is important to people at that age but if they told us, it still probably wouldn't make sense to us since we didn't have the same experience.

"Like a dozen or so coffee cans filled with screws, nuts and bolts. Or a half dozen toolboxes filled with assorted drill bits, wrenches, screwdrivers and more screws, nuts and bolts." OMG, my dad has the same stuff in his basement!

I think you should get him one of those "lady's leg" lamps from the movie "A Christmas Story"!