Letting go

My husband’s parents died in June, 2021 one week apart. No one expected his dad, my father-in-law to go first. My mother-in-law, Nancy, was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s by that summer and contracting COVID plus the isolation of the pandemic surely played a part in her demise. Daniel’s dad, Lee Fleisher, died of complications of congestive heart failure. He had had two surgeries during the pandemic, one of them open-heart because the first non-invasive one was unsuccessful. The second one–to replace a valve in his heart–did work but he never fully recovered. The winter of 2021 into spring and early summer he largely spent in doctor’s offices, going to dialysis for kidney failure and in and out of the hospital. It didn’t help that he had some of the best cardiologists in the country at Vanderbilt Medical Center, where he had spent almost two decades working as an administrator in the Psychiatry Department.

It was, to say the least, a difficult summer. We had a memorial service for them in September, 2021 at Abintra Montessori, the school that Nancy helped found when her boys were toddlers and where a building bears her name. It was a moving tribute for Nancy and Lee attended by their many friends made in their more than four decades living in Nashville. Jesse, Daniel’s older brother, and Daniel spoke eloquently of the many accomplishments and events that made up the lives of two beautiful people. A week or so later we took their ashes to the family cabin in Hickman County and laid them to rest in the garden in front of the house that Nancy had worked so hard to cultivate.

It is hard to overstate the way that “tying up loose ends” of two people whom you have loved, parents and grandparents, your closest family members living in the same city, can morph from something like grief into something more transactional like probate court, attorneys’ fees and dividing up worldly possessions. That process has taken a year a half and is still not complete.

Daniel and Jesse are two of the most unemotional, steady and pragmatic people I’ve ever met. Jesse and his wife decided they wanted the car, a lot of the furniture and dishes, but not the house where he and his brother grew up. Daniel and I, on the other hand, wanted very little furniture, just a few sentimental items, but wanted to keep the house in order to remodel it and sell it in the spring of 2023. Daniel, a contractor, is perfectly poised to take on this job and he has re-conceptualized his small construction business in order to be able to do it.

My role is to help with the design and interiors of the home we call “Granny White” because of its location on Granny White Pike almost directly across the road from Radnor Lake State Park. Daniel has been working there full-time since November 1 and I enjoy going over there about once a week to meet with him and pick out paint colors, light fixtures and envision the transformation of the 1970s ranch house into a serene mid-century family home that someone else will eventually enjoy. We thought for a moment about how that family could be us, but realized that, despite how much we love the area, our lives are in East Nashville –at least until June graduates from high school five years from now.

Last year in the late fall and early winter months I enjoyed going to the house on Granny White to meet with Daniel. I liked to sit in the parking area looking up at the hillside, remembering how it looked when I went there for the first time back in 2005 when Daniel and I first started dating. I remember being afraid as I turned off the road and onto the steep, winding driveway that seemed to last for miles of darkness before it brought me at last to the side of the house where I parked. The house faces a steep hill covered in plants –hellebores and other native species as well as trees–that descends all the way to Granny White Pike. Behind it is open space, a steep hill cresting upward to the sky, no neighbors visible in any direction. That first time it was late October and the leaves were already mostly gone. It looked spooky and dark and I thought “Why would anyone want to live here?”

I remembered the floods of May, 2010 when historic rains drenched Nashville and the Fleisher’s hillside gave way, the muddied ground tumbled, taking the trees with it, onto one side of the home. They had to completely remodel the sunny den above the garage and the hillside lost many of its densely packed trees. It looked more like a grassy open field after that and wildflowers took over as the sun was finally able to shine through. That must have been hard for Nancy and Lee, but I liked it better this way.

Then my gaze fell on the long wheelchair ramp that Daniel made for his dad the year he was sick so that he didn’t have to use the stairs at the front of the house or go all the way around to the back when he was unstable. I think he used it two or three times. He had been released from the hospital after the second surgery, or maybe he’d gone back a couple of times after that? It’s hard to keep it straight. We hired nurses to come take care of him and cook for him when he first got home. I think it was only two days before he went back to the hospital and never came home again.

That wheelchair ramp is still there, perhaps a reminder of those last trying months. But the house is starting to seem like a totally different place, one that still harbors years of memories but is in a state of becoming something entirely new. When the old carpets came up, the smell of urine that pervaded the house from when Nancy was incontinent plus years of dogs and cats and a family’s detritus vanished and the sub-floors underneath could finally breathe. And so could we.

Daniel experiences grief in his own way now as he works there every day, sometimes finding little treasures like the tiny bird bath that he uncovered when he pulled out years of neglected hedges and invasive plants from in front of the house. Nancy was an avid gardener and president of the Perennial Plant Society for many years. But in her decline and Lee with his own health problems, the grounds around the house had gotten neglected. Daniel left the little treasure for me on a tree branch outside the large window where we usually sit to have our meetings. I spotted it immediately. He told me he cried when he tore down the old wooden structure at the top of the driveway that held the trash bins. He had made it for his parents many years ago. His tears come in waves, he says. The cleaning out of the attic and years and years of his childhood things was hard. There were many dumpsters filled with memories.

Last month I did some research on the hill on which the house sits and confirmed something I thought was true. The hillside in South Nashville–the area is called Forest Hills–was the site of an important Civil War Battle, the Battle of Nashville. I could feel the intensity of the energy at that house, in that location, since the very first time I went there. One time, early in our relationship, Daniel’s parents got a new puppy. They went out of town and asked us to dog sit at the house. I went over there fully intending to spend the night with him and the dog but something gave me pause and I felt dread in my body. I could not explain why but I had this dark, foreboding feeling that I just could not sleep there. We packed up the dog and our things and went back to my apartment. It was always my gut feeling that many dark and terrible things occurred on those hills just outside of town. I was so new to Nashville then and hadn’t yet grasped the geographical importance of that particular area. It took years before I would have the time to look into it further.

When we started renovations on the house I got to spend more time there –time that is not about in-laws or grandparents or family gatherings, although I have many happy memories of those years. It is no longer about Nancy’s slowly deteriorating mind or Lee’s difficult care-taking of her in the years before she went to Abe’s Garden. It isn’t about Lee’s final days and his illness or medications or doctors and nurses. It is now about regeneration and renewal. It is about the new chapter still to be written in the life of the home on that storied hill and the letting go of our relationship with it. I’ll write more and share more photos as the project progresses. We hope to put it on the market this spring –a good time to be hopeful.