The Leftovers

And then, just like that, I was alone.

Unceremoniously.

After decades of swimming in the chaos that begat a household of 3-7 children, a thunderous silence settled upon the family home that had, for as long as I could remember, relentlessly buzzed with activity.

The first had already gone off to college and then graduated with a 30K student loan for a certificate in a field that was replaced wholesale by AI two weeks before graduation. The middle had struck out on his own earlier in the year, simultaneously determined to not accept any help from his father and also unwilling to help himself.

So many life lessons.

I'd made a fourth, but she'd always lived with her mom in Vernon, and over the years had become less and less enthusiastic about visiting for a weekend. She hardly returns my text messages anymore, teenagers and all that, so I had never had the opportunity to have her around often enough to be affronted by a conspicuous absence.

But now, I was alone.

I had never been alone, I realised. What am I supposed to do? I suppose I could start walking around naked. What if I started losing my grip on reality and descended into madness and there was nobody there to say "hey man, snap out of it"? No kids who were relying on me to keep it together because if I flailed out they'd have no one left to carry them. This is perhaps the real reason I had never had a nervous breakdown despite all the stress - not because I was particularly emotionally strong, but because I knew if I just collapsed into a heap... wait a minute...

A memory: It was the day I realised that my wife was cheating on me and didn't want to be a family anymore and all my efforts and designs at the white picket fence were going to be cast into boxes and left on the curb for the thrifters. I did collapse that day, I remember now, on the floor, shattered. And my kids, who were just little then - 1, 3 and 5 - they found me on the kitchen floor and they came to me and piled on me. I remember now. 

They had lifted me up, and after that I never again let myself fall down like that. 

My entire life I'd had a whole sidecar bolted onto me, sometimes as many as a half dozen or more other humans dangling off the side, relying solely upon me for food and shelter and the kind of emotional support that used to be provided by an entire community, but was then relegated to a family, and when their mother ran away, was placed solely onto me.

It was "me and my three", this was how I had defined myself for my entire adult life, how I had reconstructed myself after the heartbreaks and failed relationships, and over the course of the past couple of years I had seen the change coming and had undergone a mid-life-redefinition.

It's the kind of thing that you can see coming from a mile away, like wildfire on the nearby mountain, at first a small yet alarming plume of smoke in the distance. You try to prepare for it, scurry around and do what you think needs to be done, but it moves on its own time and the closer it gets the more it transforms the world around you until the earth itself below your feet seems as though it is trembling, and eventually you realise that maybe you could never be "ready" for it.

Oh, I had a list of tiny annoyances I was looking forward to being relieved of:

• Dirty dishes left on the counter in the morning after I had already cleaned up before going to bed. The laundry machines being overloaded and forgotten, left to go musty. 
• The food waste that had been carelessly tossed into the garbage bin even though the corner of the bag had clearly fallen in so the food just fell down the side of the bag into the bottom of the bin and started going mouldy because apparently I am the only one who can see it or do anything about it. 
• The constant drone of media emanating from a myriad of screens wandering the house. 
• Shoes in the middle of the floor in front of the door. 
• Garbage everywhere. 
• Toothpaste splatters on the mirror. 
• ...

Actually, the splatters that seem to appear on every single goddamn fucking surface of your house from the cupboard doors and fridge handle all the way to the framed pictures and ceiling somehow.

Yes, I would be lying if I said I wasn't looking forward to not having things like "clean the ceiling" added to my chore list because an anonymous teenage tenant had exploded something and then not bothered to clean it all the way up. 

The anonymous tenant, "gee I don't know how that got there it's a mystery", even when there was only the two of us left in the house. 

Grr.

But I knew also that these were minor annoyances, the kind that accumulate into great frustrations over many years and decades, true, but minor nonetheless, and I was careful to not fall back into my ranty self in those final months.

Was it a measure of the maturity I had earned over all these years? Maybe more like an ultra-marathon runner who somehow found the strength to just trundle through the final kilometres, heavy eyes fixed on the finish line, shit running down my legs.

I don't have much time with them left, and these are small things I told myself, and I was right, because suddenly here I was standing knee deep in the thunderous silence of a kitchen gone the kind of deathly silent only a parent who's just seen the last of their kids at home off to college can hear. For the first time I could hear the hand of the analog clock counting off the seconds as I stood there, stunned, the autumn's impending arrival echoing off the crisping edges of the backyard's whispering aspens, the yowl of a distant pack of coyotes, a breeze carrying it all through the crack in the kitchen window.

The cat walked into the room, looked first at me and then at the dog, and then sat down, sensing the moment, as if to say Something's weird, dad.

"Yeah, it is," I answered her aloud. 

Now what?

I started tidying the kitchen, cleaning dishes I didn't make one last time. I discovered the rice maker to be full of mouldy rice. One last time...

It is said that there is a last time for everything and usually you don't really realise when it is until long after it has happened.  The last time you hang out with a certain group of friends. The last time you kiss a lover. The last time you talk to your grandfather. The last time you can scoop up your child in your arms or ride them on your shoulders or toss them into the shopping cart while you get your groceries. 

I dumped the rotten rice into the garbage, and absent mindedly fixed the edge of the bag, which had fallen in, wrestling with a feeling I had never had before. Was this sonder? No. It makes me want to scream with terror and pride, the victory of having seen them into adulthood and the loss at the warmth that my pile of puppies had filled my life with. 

It seems like the kind of thing that the Germans would have a word for, or could make up a word for, some abstract blend of complex human emotions... fuck OK I'm going to look it up. Hey ChatGPT.....

Auszugsweh — not an established German word, but a perfectly plausible compound: the ache of moving out.

See, I knew it. Damn Germans.

I smiled to myself, auszugsweh lapping at my mind like waves upon the shore.

Then I cleaned the garbage can too, splatters and mouldy bread and all.

The three of us - the dog my ex had wanted, the cat my daughter couldn't take with her, and me - each of us together alone, looking at one another with a kind of existential confusion.

Now we were the leftovers.