what gets shredded

In our house are several bankers boxes of paperwork from Mom's house. Some of it I took years ago when I had power-of-attorney, though mostly it was to get the reams of banking information out of her house. It was driving her crazy. She wasn't a collector or pack rat, but by that time, it was beyond her ability to sort through the volumes of information to determine whether it was worth keeping. I just took it (back to Illinois with me) rather than undertake the daunting task of sorting through it myself. And so it got moved back here. But it's not going to Washington, so I am shredding and burning and sorting.

In her home, in the dining room buffet drawers, she had a few fat interoffice envelopes filled with such things as pay stubs, tax returns, medical bills and "sentimental receipts." The other night, in front of the fire, I came across the hospital bills from when each of us children was born, and mailed them off to the respective beneficiaries. Fitkin Hospital (now Jersey Shore University Medical Center) charged $11 a day for a semi-private room in 1955. By 1957, that sum was $15 per day. The entire cost of delivery, supplies, room and phone for my birth was $157, for six days (including $5 a day for "baby"). There is no detail for the twins' birth, and not even a full bill, in 1959.

Right now I'm going through a large box that has lots of Medicare and other insurance bills and some bank information. I came across the ID card for when Dad was in Memorial Sloan-Kettering in 1991, and the bills, attached to the reports, from the hospital in New Smyrna Beach, FL, where my parents were wintering when Dad became ill. So I just found out that he had bilateral emphysema, in an otherwise unremarkable geriatric chest. He didn't smoke after the age of 22 or so, and other than mild asbestosis, I didn't know he had any lung issues at all. Of course it's a moot point, since he died of lymphoma, which was in his chest, neck and groin. It was a bad one, although I distinctly remember a doctor at Sloan telling Dad that what he had was very treatable and controllable. Evidently that was before the second biopsy results were in.

I don't want to be revisiting this stuff right now. I already feel like the weight of the world is on my shoulders, with this monstrous wreck of a house in need of packing and sorting. But I suppose there's something fitting about wallowing a bit in family history, as I prepare to leave the part of the country where it all happened. It's a time of great grief for me, remembering and imagining. I imagine how awful it was for Mom to have to deal with a raft of medical bills after Dad died. I imagine how frightening it must have been for her to see her one and only love become weaker and weaker. I imagine how terrible it must have been for her to see him at the point of no return, convulsing with the uncontrollable fever, that night she asked me to find out how to increase the morphine drip and let him die.

It all makes sense to me, of course. It's time, finally, for me to unburden my heart of all the tears that I've bottled up. Like these papers, I don't want to be bringing that to Washington.

And I should have gotten a better shredder, for both jobs.