I, too, was a member of the Kimberling City PEO Group.  Willie was such a delightful and interesting person.  I feel fortunate to have known her.  I had the pleasure of visiting her several times after she moved to Nashville.  My condolences to her family.

I wrote this 11 years ago, when Mom moved to Tennessee... 

My mother, who is 88, recently moved into a smaller house. She spent months deciding what to keep and what to sell or give away. Even so, we helped her pack 203 boxes. Half of them held books, linens and china. Another 30, carefully labeled and stacked in the garage, held those things that couldn't fit inside the house, but also could not be discarded, including photo albums and hundreds of letters. 

Downsizing is painful. It forces us to deal with how much identity we find in what we own. How many memories are vested in a teapot, a piano, a particular sweater, a painting, book, house or even a frying pan?  Without the item around as a prompt, will the memory be lost? And if the memory is lost, is the person lost?

And then there are the memories of others. My mother owns a pair of tall, delicate, etched-glass vases carried back from Europe by my father's great-grandfather, a man of position in St. Louis. My mother never knew this man; neither did my father. The Bavarian red vases are a little ornate for my mother's taste and she is always afraid they will break. But to sell them or give them away would be, in some way, to lose or disrespect that long-dead man's life. 

I carefully unwrapped the lavender dessert plates and glasses that my mother gave to her own mother many years earlier, I remember packing them once before  30 years ago when we moved my grandmother north to live with my parents for her last nine months of life. She died slowly of ALS. My mother wanted me to come home and help. I was in between jobs and still single. I declined, and now regret it. I wondered how long it might be before I would be wrapping those plates again, and in whose china cabinet they would next reside. 

Things don't disappear; they just circulate. I have friends whose homes suddenly became crowded with the things their parents had to give up. Next to a Danish dining room set a place is found for a walnut sideboard with its memory of pumpkin, coconut and pecan pies lined up waiting to be sliced on Thanksgiving. An old rocker that soothed to sleep three generations of babies is squeezed next to a purple futon couch. An Oriental rug covers a kitchen's tile floor simply because there is no other place in the house for it but its patterns and colors and the tear in one corner are dear childhood friends and can not be discarded. 

If downsizing only involved things, it wouldn't be so hard. In fact mid-life downsizing can be refreshing. But downsizing, especially toward the end of life, involves so much more than things. 

I've watched my mother physically downsize in recent years. We used to be the same height; now I'm at least five inches taller. Her voice has changed, downsized in a way that gives it a quiver and, at times, a trailing off. She sounds like my grandmother, not my mother. She no longer can carry her own suitcase through an airport; in fact she opts for a wheelchair. She no longer drives on highways or at night, much to our relief. She speaks less frequently of wanting to visit Egypt and Italy. 

She has traded in a community where she knew a lot of people and was still delivering wheels-on-meals and writing news releases for the Democratic Party, for a community that consists primarily of my sister's family and lots of long telephone calls with her aging cousins in California, Missouri and Texas.

She has kept her piano, her crossword puzzles, her skill at Scrabble and her love of desserts. And she's still got her sense of humor, but she doesn't always hear the punch line. She has not downsized her worrying, but then no one in the family ever did. And she can still throw a meaningful look, that stops me in my tracks trying to figure out my latest wrong-doing. 

I cut the seal on yet one more large box and find at least 10 sets of sheets and pillow cases. The three beds set up by the moving men  the one large enough for a small family in my mother's bedroom, a narrow day bed in her study and a queen in the guest room  already had linens on them. 

I could understand an extra set for each bed, but a box load? I start to call out to Mom  which means yelling since the hearing aid is on the blink  to suggest some of these linens might well be given to Goodwill. 

But then I lifted one of the smooth, neatly-folded sheets to my nose and inhaled. I iron sheets about as often as I fold my underwear. But I slept between ironed sheets throughout my childhood and cherish the way they smell and feel. I see my mother, standing at the ironing board, pressing sheets one fold at a time, keeping one eye on her steaming iron and another on the television. And I recalled that in my grandmother's home there was always room for one more visiting relative to bed down and always on clean sheets.  

I sat on the floor with that sheet pressed to my face and made a vow: when it was time for my Mom's final downsizing, I would be there with her for as long as she needed me. I found a place for the sheets on a top shelf in the back of Mom's closet. Then we played Scrabble. She won.

To Willie's family:  Willie was  a beloved member of the Kimberling  City, MO PEO group which is where I met her in 1999.She was so very delightful and was missed greatly when she moved away.  My hubby and I visited her in Nashville a few years ago and we went out to eat.  How lucky you all were to have her with you for so many years. God rest her soul and may he be with you as you mourn your beautiful mother.

OBITUARY

Willis Ann Wolff

February 28, 1919 – March 25, 2018

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