Moving Karin

by Laura Manuel

Defeated petunias droop to cracked concrete from a plastic pot. Their spindly arms hang and reach, hoping for a second chance. A story of frustration is etched on my sister’s door— deep scratches from a wheelchair forced through an uncooperative frame. I inhale bright rays before I enter a stale, nicotine-infused, television buzz.

Karin is not dressed. She hunches over an iPad and taps bright colours on the screen. Her short hair sticks up in several directions like a satellite searching for a signal. The condo feels overly warm but Karin wears fleece pajama pants. A faded, green, Beaver Canoe t-shirt sits askew at her neckline to expose a bare shoulder.

The Puritan in me rises up, red, shrill and old-fashioned.

“Get dressed and wash up,” I think. “It’s nearly noon!”

I swallow the scolding. I’ve become adept at burying judgements and covering them with good intentions. I do, however, ask why she hasn’t put in her teeth.

“Don’t want to,” she says with a gummy smile. She knows it bothers me. Did she avoid getting dressed on purpose too?

“I guess eating will be difficult,” I respond sharply.

Already, that familiar tug to get her to eat something wholesome. Karin’s diet is of the processed variety, washed down thick coffee and generous liters of Coca Cola. Over the years, her habits have taken their toll. Pushing her oversized wheelchair is now a workout. And when required to balance from wheelchair to toilet to bed and back, it’s with heavy effort.

An expansive and fleshy right arm—her left side paralyzed from the stroke—swings to reach for a mug of cold coffee.

“I asked mom to bring me coffee,” she growls, “You know what she brought? A can from her fucking pantry. Don’t know how old that crap was. Drank it anyway. Shit all over the place for three days.”

I don’t hide my grimace. I’m accustomed to hearing her talk this way. Profanity hangs from her like ornaments. Her words often startle and shock as she thuds through a sentence. They are micro-attacks on a world that only seems to offer steady misfortune and tragedy.

“Hey, make me another, would ya?” Karin huffs as she pushes the cold mug away.

I start to prepare a pot and scoop from the tin on the counter.

“Not that coffee! That’s the shit mom brought!” she yells.

“Didn’t want to throw it out, eh?” I ask, irritated. And I toss the whole can into the garbage bag lying on the floor.

“Pft,” she says in response and turns away from me. She’s back to her iPad to stab at a screen that won’t ask questions.

I’m here to make sense out of apparent randomness. The task is to fill boxes and garbage bags, sort and organize. Nothing will leave the house without Karin’s review. She thinks I throw away her things. (Sometimes I do.) I’m guilty of judging the assembly of items that surround Karin like a fortress: an infant’s sleeper, broken clock, acrylic paints, a single gardening glove, Christmas wine glasses, a stranded Air Supply CD, purple witch’s hat, mosquito netting, the Book of Mormon, a fold-out greeting card of St. Peter’s Cathedral. The obscure objects go on and on.

I used to believe Karin held on to things because they were more solid than memory, that the objects somehow embodied a previous version of herself. Perhaps belongings are the reification of possibility.

People hang on to things for other reasons too.

For Karin, material objects provide presence and relevance. Her wheelchair-confined days weave in and out of lonely nights. Time stretches and morphs. Minutes are scarred with loss, monotony and longing. Hours are a complicated knot of grief and hope. As long as she has things, she exists.

To separate Karin from her objects is like pulling down walls. Garbage bags are a cruel insistence for Karin to define herself. I often wonder if it’s kinder to let her remain behind her scaffolding.

“Where’s that blue vase?” she asks.

I look at her quizzically.

“Damn it. You know. The one that matches the pitcher.”

I try to remember but I can’t picture it. I go hunt for Karin’s identity in the basement. I feel a familiar, irreversible guilt: I can’t find it.

“Gave it away, probably,” she alleges. I’m reminded how much of her has been handled by me. She knows it too, even if she can’t articulate it.

This is the sixth time I have moved my sister. The first time I naively thought I could show up in sneakers and jeans on a Saturday to load boxes into a truck. It was supposed to include sitcom-inspired pivoting couches in a stairwell, friendly jokes with pizza and beer. But people with brain injuries don’t live in sitcoms.

When I arrived at Karin’s house on moving day there were no boxes to be seen. I offered to pack up the kitchen.

How could I have known then how familiar I would become with her chipped, cherry prints? How I’d learn unpaid bills live beneath coffee rings. That weed is in the cookie jar and Jagermeister lives next to the tomato sauce. We packed it all that day. Every—last—item. Because there was no time for sorting, no time to ask essential questions.

I try to clear the table for lunch but clutter occupies every surface. A solemn jar of basil stands next to a bottle of bath oil. Stray hairs are glued to its plastic rim. A bag of cornmeal rests astride the local, rural newspaper. The half-open bag has collapsed in on itself and pale yellow grit is strewn across the municipal Reeve shaking hands with 4H youth. A mysterious black bolt has rolled into a stack of unopened

envelopes that threaten to topple into the open toaster oven.

Karin wants to order Chinese but I need to use up groceries that nest like swallows in an unattended barn. Karin’s kitchen explodes with food. But I must be cautious—not everything is how it appears.

Bread looks okay. We can make sandwiches. I double-check the date, examine it for mould. It passes. I open the fridge. Ugh. What can I pull out today?

“That ham is fine,” she calls from the living room as I give it a sniff.

“You bought it ten days ago,” I say warily, rechecking the date.

“I’ll eat it,” she says. And she will, if only to spite me. She wants to prove herself. She wants to demonstrate that she doesn’t need to move into an assisted living facility.

I start to toss items from the fridge: milk from last month, soft strawberries coated in fuzz, a sour cream container with green crawling from under the rim. Over the years, I’ve become sickeningly familiar with blooms of white, green or grey, the microbial filaments that devour ignored sugars. Even pickled carrots, left long enough, transform into a miniature agricultural landscape.

I pull out several dishes of spaghetti and meat sauce, carefully covered in foil.

“I made those,” Karin says proudly, “So I could have meals to warm up.”

I lift a corner and recognize the white fuzz on top of the meat

sauce. Good intentions short on follow-through.

Simple cheese sandwiches and soup for lunch. An easy meal for me to make but Karin watches me slice cheese with a forlorn gaze.

When Karin had the stroke, we were told to expect different forms of grief. I’ve learned grief isn’t linear and it never ends, it simply changes form. In this way, Karin says goodbye to her former life again and again and again. Her will to live is a fight for continuous farewells. She fights for more days backward.

“Hey, you want that organic ketchup?” she asks, gesturing to the bottle out of place on the bookshelf.

“Not really,” I respond, “Why? Don’t you want it?”

“Bought it accidentally,” says Karin, “I don’t eat that crap.”

“You mean organic?”

“Yeah, I need all the fucking preservatives,” she says, “How else will I live longer?”

We chuckle that awkward laughter that trails into truth.

After lunch I start to pack her books. She monitors my progress. I hold North America’s authoritative manual on pregnancy, What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

“Hey, I want to keep that one,” she says gruffly.

“Think you’ll need to reference it soon?” I attempt a joke.

“I just want to keep it, ok?” she says.

I place it in the ‘keep’ box. I stack it next to the governmentissued driver’s manual. Karin talks about getting her license again and the truck a neighbour is selling.

“Your driver’s license will never happen,” I want to tell her realistically. But I retain a kind silence. Hope often appears unreasonable or irrational.

I was told to daydream with my children no matter how ridiculous. A wild imagination is hope in disguise.

For Karin, hope is housed in objects. But she cannot save everything.

A cigarette hangs from Karin’s dry lips. The spongy filter is lightly squeezed in her toothless mouth. She looks like a Halloween pumpkin forgotten on the porch.

“Where’s that green BBQ lighter,” Karin asks.

I do a cursory glance at surfaces still bursting with clutter. During lunch I’d placed her smoking items together in a tin near the window. A red lighter rests inside.

“That lighter doesn’t work,” she says bluntly.

“Then we’ll throw it out,” I say. It wasn’t a question anymore.

“No! Keep it,” she shouts as I lift the edge of the garbage bag. “Sometimes they just start working again. It might start working again.”

The word ‘might’ hung almost tangibly in the air. It filled the same space as ‘if’ and ‘maybe’ and ‘when’.

Karin spies the green BBQ lighter between a stack of appliance manuals. She clicks it into the air before her and leans forward. There is a hint of a smile through the first wafts of smoke. My eyes water as I return the faulty lighter to the tin.

I’m still unsure exactly what I’ve saved.