We moved some of her things when she moved into care.
Not everything. The new room has its own dimensions and the dimensions are smaller and not everything she had fits, which is its own kind of loss, the loss of the full context, the way a life reduced to a single room loses the furniture that held the evidence of itself, the chair that was always in the corner and the lamp she has had since before I was born and the small table where she always kept her tea and her book and the reading glasses she was always looking for.
The chair is in my living room now.
I moved it there because it would not fit in storage without damage and also, honestly, because I wanted it near me, wanted the object that held the shape of her daily life in my daily life, wanted to be able to look at it from the couch and feel the particular quality of a thing that carries someone’s use in it, that has been sat in so many times it holds a particular give that is hers, that receives my weight differently than it received hers but is still, unmistakably, her chair.
I have not sat in it.
I am not ready to sit in it. Maybe I will be someday. Maybe the sitting in it will feel like a continuity rather than a taking-over, like inhabiting something she is still alive to have given me, like receiving a thing while the giver is still present to see the receiving. For now I let it be hers. I let it stand in my living room as her chair, not mine, a piece of her life installed in my life with her permission, because she said: take what you want, take what you can use, I am glad if it is useful. She was always like that. Practical about the things, sentimental about the people. Practical about the chair. Knowing I would be the other kind about it and finding that fine.
Her lamp is on my bedside table.
I turn it on every night. The light it makes is the light from her room, her specific warm lamp-light that has been the light of her bedside table for forty years. I turn it on and I read under it and I am in my room and also, somehow, briefly, in hers. Both rooms at once. The light making the connection that geography no longer makes for us. Both of us, reading, in the same warm light.
