Bee's Bottles

These pill bottles are a small sampling of the collection my mother gathered in her 80’s before being placed into a Long Term Care facility due to her slowly evolving dementia.

As part of what must be OCD or some other compulsive disorder, she channeled her creative energy into collecting and assembling little bundles of items like newspaper clippings, paper, trimmed card stock, pins, clips, pens and pencils.

She also spent many hours with her scissors trimming all paper items smaller and smaller ... every letter, postcard, envelope was trimmed to save space. Fortunately she did not trim too many photos!!

Following a fire many years ago when we were still children in which our family lost all of our possessions (except for some photos and jewelry), we moved into a small 2 bedroom flat for a short time and then a 5 room upper duplex which my parents lived in for about 40 years.

Downsizing from this upper duplex to a 2 bedroom apartment in an independent senior's residence, was a major project both physically and emotionally for my parents. My father was excited to finally be moving to a new clean place. For him it was just a matter of throwing it all out, whereas for my mother it was a very traumatic time having to part with her hoard.

She had surrounded herself with newspapers piled 3 feet high around the perimeter of the house, as she couldn’t bare the thought of missing out on an important news item or obituary and then could never catch up with the daily inflow.

There were medical pamphlets on every condition imaginable collected during her years recovering from her own breast cancer battle as part of Hope and Cope and her volunteering at hospitals and senior centers. I imagine she never walked by one of those pamphlet walls without grabbing a handful!

Also evidence of her creative urges appeared through bundles of pens and bits of pencils and much note paper recycled from the backs of cereal boxes to bits of larger pieces which she trimmed from a variety of previously used stationary. Maybe she was just ahead of her time with the upcycling trend! But with bundles of pins, elastics, numerous erasers and many other little trinkets like a sea shell, doll arms, tassels, beads, bits of jewelry ... she made many bundles and filled many a jar and container. Truly a Marie Kondo nightmare!!

As none of their kids lived in the same city, a person experienced in decluttering and downsizing was engaged to come in, and over a few months of visiting several times a week, garbage bags were filled. While I didn’t witness this it was important to me that my mother didn’t associate all this purging of her life’s collection with her children. It was a neutral third party who was the bad guy, unscrupulously throwing out all the papers before she could review each piece! Upwards of 100 large contractor trash bags were slowly placed on the curb week after week.

After purchasing new furniture and settling into their nice new apartment, my father felt proud of his clean new space, and it seemed my mother was also relieved to have the weight of living surrounded by so much chaos lifted and begin again in a clean tidy environment.

That was late August. By Christmas my father had died and my mother had broken her hip and was in a rehab hospital where she spent 3 months recovering from hip surgery.

She would go back to the senior's residence, but not the same apartment. While she was in the hospital we had to downsize her again to a one bedroom.

So once again more cleaning and organizing. This time my brother came in to town to take care of it. She came home from rehab to almost the same apartment - similar layout, but smaller and with one less room. All her possessions had been moved and reorganized without her presence.

But she accepted her circumstances with grace and a smile, always a good word and a smile. But alas the past few years of loss and trauma, losing her sister, her brother, her husband, her life’s collection is all a lot to process and perhaps her dementia provides a simple space where she can live more in the present moment and enjoy the small joys life still offers.

Clicking on each bottle presents a larger image.