Years before I moved Willie into assisted living, I helped Indy and Willie pack up their house for the move to the Temple of Doom. 

Packing up a two-story, four-bedroom house inhabited by, at times, as many as seven people over 50 years is daunting if I’m generous, impossible if I’m not. 

Willie and I agreed our best course of action was to tackle one room over one day each week until we’d worked our way through each room in the house. 

You’re thinking I meant to say, “Indy, Willie, and I.” 

I did not mean to say that. 

Indy had very little say in this move. 

See, one day in 2015, Willie nearly died. It was then that I told Indy and Willie it was time for them to go into independent living. 

They kicked me out of the house. 

Eventually, Willie came around. Which was all I really needed.  

Willie and I chose the Temple of Doom. We chose the apartment — not the small one Indy preferred, but the big one, the one with two bedrooms and a kitchen island. 

And we chose how to proceed with the move. 

Indy went along with everything peaceably because, well, we needed his opinion — and we gave it to him. 

It’s why Indy and I always got along. He did whatever I told him to do. 

Willie, well. Not so much. 

But when it was time to move to the Temple of Doom, Willie and I agreed on the one-day-a-week plan and got the ball rolling. 

Is it easy to pack up everything you’ve ever known? To throw away, donate, bequeath fragments of your childhood? 

Oh my gosh, yes. So easy. 

If you’re a monster. 

C’mon! No! It’s terrible! You can couch it as an exciting move for your parents, the fruition of their hard work. But the truth you both know is that you’re trading your family home for the waiting room to your parents’ coffin. It’s just disguised as an apartment at the Temple of Doom. 

And if they have one foot in the grave, what does that say about you? You’re not exactly in your ’90s jeans, velvet choker, Rock the Vote, Beverly Hills, 90210 era, now, are you? 

No. Not when your chosen television programming is targeting you with ads for life insurance, incontinence solutions, and hearing aids. 

The only thing that kept me from the antidepressants MeTV insists I need was the rewards I paid myself after a day of clearing out. Starbucks, lava cake, wine, and whatever I was bingeing in 2019. 

Fortunately, the heavy lifting and repetitive trips up and down the stairs of my childhood home prevented any of that from sticking to my ribs. 

As Willie and I worked our way through each room, Willie would come across items falling into what I would call a gray area. She wasn’t sure if she had room for those items at the Temple of Doom.  

She wasn’t sure if she was ready to get rid of them. 

And she wasn’t sure if she had storage space for them. 

You – you know what my solution was, right? Surely you saw it trundling down the path towards us a few paragraphs ago? 

Yeah. I offered to store the “gray” stuff — gray matter? — at my house. 

This is how I wound up with 75 Dickens’ Village houses, a fake Christmas tree, a sewing machine with its table, and Willie’s collection of every book written by Mary Higgins Clark. 

Indy, too, had gray matter. 

“Get rid of it,” Willie would tell Indy. 

But I couldn’t bear Indy tossing the stuff he felt quasi-attached to.  

So each time Indy was directed to trash his treasure, I’d pull him aside. Slip him my car keys. Tell him to load everything into my car. 

His gray matter would be at my house if he needed it. 

That is how I wound up with Indy’s movie projector, boxes of film and slides, toolkit, his other toolkit, and his other other toolkit at my house. 

Some of the slides and film were labeled “Malaysia,” presumably from his years stationed there. That was before me. Before Willie, even. 

“Do not,” said my husband, “look at those. There is no good that comes from you watching what your dad did in Malaysia 50 years ago.” 

You may be wondering what my husband thought of me moving Christmas trees and movie projectors into our home — a home with no basement, no attic.

If so, I encourage you to go back to the beginning of this piece. Read it again.  

Do I sound like a girl who lets other people weigh in? Have I given you that impression? 

Also, any discussion about the stuff we store at our house will most certainly involve his boxes of comic books and hockey cards.  

So there’s that. 

When I moved Willie to assisted living last year, the choices of what to keep, what to toss were even more gut-wrenching.  

What do you do with your mom’s wedding dress? Your dad’s military uniform?  

And I don’t know why Indy kept a bus ticket from 1962 or why Willie had six newspaper cutouts of her engagement announcement. But they had to be important, right? Who was I to throw them away? 

I have nobody left who can explain the significance of these items. Indy is gone, and Willie thinks I’m that nice girl who takes her to her manicures. She has zero insight into the card with the palm tree on the front, addressed to Indy, full of women wishing him well. 

Ahem. 

All of this is to say that yes, Willie’s wedding dress and Indy’s bus ticket are stored at my house.  

They are my gray matter.  

They are in my gray matter. 

And it is there, I suspect, they’ll forever stay.