Moving Beyond Customer Service Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Moving Beyond Customer Service - Essay Example 2. The correspondence methods utilized by the staff of the lodging, including those at the front work area and at Ballroom A, were gracious. Shockingly, the head supervisor of the lodging was presumptuous and ill bred to the inn visitors. A potential clash might be evaded if the senior supervisor didn't communicate his feelings concerning how baffled he has become with respect to people with incapacities. Heightening of contention from potential to genuine might be forestalled by thinking about how the customer must feel that he was unable to go to the wedding since his wheelchair couldn't go through the capacity room. A satisfying tone in conveying to the visitors may likewise forestall the acceleration of the contention. 3. One clash included the non-accessibility of a space for one lodging visitor, regardless of her introduction of an affirmation number for a booking that was made fourteen days sooner. An answer for this issue would include the prompt arrangement of a space for this specific visitor and perhaps an extra component, for example, a free supper from the hotel’s lounge area, complimentary. The other clash included the failure of an incapacitated visitor to get into the capacity room of a wedding. A potential answer for this contention would include the development of tables in the capacity room and be helping the visitor in getting into the wedding gathering. 4. The staff individuals from the lodging didn't assume full liability for settling the contentions since they approached the head supervisor for answers for these issues. Clashes could have been forestalled if the front work area agent gave a space to the main lodging visitor. On account of the wedding episode, the circumstance could have been improved if the inn collaborator assumed the liability of helping the visitor in breaking through to the wedding gathering without the assistance of the head supervisor.

Drug Abusing Fathers Essay Example For Students

Medication Abusing Fathers Essay The reason for this investigation is to find out the effects of medication manhandling fathers onthe sedate utilization of their young youthful kids. An extraordinary focused on populationwere picked for this examination; they are the offspring of medication mishandling fathers whoare HIV-positive or in danger of turning out to be HIV-positive. The main considerations utilized todetermine the reliant proportion of pre-adult weed use incorporate certain drugabusing father properties (i.e., illicit medication use, HIV status, and techniques ofcoping), and juvenile character which is legitimately influenced by thefather-pre-adult relationship and ecological components (see pathway toadolescent cannabis use). The focal point of this paper will be on the impacts ofparent-kid relationship, fathers pot utilization and HIV status of thefather on the teenagers pot use. These picked spaces (i.e., set ofrelated factors) are a piece of the examination expected to decide the example ofrelationshi p between father medicate use and youthful medication use. This examination isan expansion of a prior investigation of the psychosocial factors identified with theAIDS-hazard practices and techniques for adapting among male infusion medicate clients e.g.,1. By concentrating on the parental methodology, it is trust that this data willallow a dad to be a progressively powerful parent and help him in bringing hischildren up in a way that they wouldnt need to go to medications to adapt withlifes troubles (i.e., having a medication manhandling father that is in danger ofbecoming HIV positive). Techniques Participants: Participants were male volunteersrecruited from AIDS centers and methadone upkeep treatment facilities, with ahistory of medication misuse (i.e., more likely than not occupied with either infusion tranquilize use oranother type of unlawful medication maltreatment during the previous five years). Just thosevolunteers who consented to be met alongside one of their 13-20-year- oldchildren were enrolled for investment. So as to meet all requirements for participationin the examination, the men must be either living with the kid or have seen thechild at any rate multiple times in the previous year (dominant part of the youngsters live withthe mother). An aggregate of one hundred and one dad kid sets took part inthis study; 71 recognized themselves as African-American and 27 identifiedthemselves as White (the other three distinguished themselves as other). All fatherparticipants had utilized intravenous medications or unlawful medications (other than marijuanaor notwithstanding weed) by a non-infusion course of organization withinthe recent years. Members that were not considered for this studyinclude the individuals who had AIDS dementia, the individuals who were too wiped out to even think about participating inthe study, and the individuals who had a significant mental issue (i.e., bipolardisorder or schizophrenia). Every patient deliberately detailed his own HIVstatus. Over 98% of the subjects reports of their HIV status were confirmedby the ELISA (Enzyme Linked Immunosorbent Assay) and the Western Blot tests. Ofthe 101 dad members, 38% were HIV positive and 62% were HIV negative. Just kids who were at that point mindful of their dads HIV status werequalified to partake in the investigation. Technique: After giving informedconsent, each father-kid pair was met for around four hoursusing an organized survey. The questioners were either advocates orsocial laborers at an AIDS facility or a methadone support treatment center andhad broad experience working with substance abusers as well as HIV positivepatients. Each endeavor was made to coordinate the members and the interviewersin terms of their ethnic foundations. The meetings were led privatelyand the classification of the information was carefully protected. Each father-childpair member was offered $50 to make up for his/her time and costs. Measures: The scales utilized in this investigation depended on their thing (question)inter-relationship. These scales were gathered into four areas: Fathersattributes, father-kid relationship, teenagers character, andenvironmental factors. The dad qualities incorporate his HIV status, illegaldrug use, and strategies for adapting to HIV or the danger of having HIV. The measureof the dads unlawful medication utilize was gotten from a consolidated score of thefathers report of his illicit medication use and the childs report of thefathers illicit medication use. It is found in past investigations that by combiningthe parent and childrens reactions to measures gives a greaterpredictability than utilizing one source alone. The dad youngster relationship domaininclude proportions of warmth/love, child rearing factors, (for example, mothersparenting style and fathers child rearing style, for example, rules and discipline),childs recognizable proof with the two guardians (profound respect, imitating), father-childconflict, and the measure of time the dad and kid spent together. Aside from forthe childs distinguishing proof with the dad scale, which is exclusively from thechilds scores, all the dad kid relationship scales were from a combinedscore of every dad and his childs polls. The adolescentpersonality area incorporates prejudice of abnormality, rebelliousness,delinquency, hostility, sexual movement, and different proportions of problembehavior. These measures were totally taken distinctly from the childs self-reports. Percy Bysshe Shelley EssayThe last space, ecological, included proportions of school environment,victimization, and group enrollment. These measures were likewise taken distinctly from thereports of the youngster. Investigations: Pearson connection coefficients were computedbetween the scales in the two area picked (i.e., father characteristics andfather-kid connections) and the young people past-year weed use. Forthe motivation behind this paper, I have picked just the factors from the fatherattributes and father-youngster relationship spaces for the communication regressionanalyses. This will permit us to analyze the impact of a variable from one domainin the nearness of another space will have on the childs maryjane utilization. For all the examinations, the reliant variable was the youths recurrence ofmarijuana use during the year prior to the meeting. Results Pearson correlationcoefficients were processed to inspect the relationship between the fatherattributes, the dad youngster relationship factors, and the recurrence of theadolescents past year maryjane utilization. (See table beneath). CorrelationCoefficients between Scale Measures and Frequency of Past Year AdolescentMarijuana Use Scale Measures Adolescent Marijuana Use Father AIDS 0.07 FatherMarijuana utilize 0.25* Father Admiration-Youth - 0.20* Mother Admiration-Youth-0.36*** Father Affection-Youth - 0.28** Mother Affection-Youth - 0.29** YouthMother Warmth-Father - 0.22* Youth Father Warmth-Father - 0.18+ Father youngster centerness-Youth-0.20* Mother kid centerness-Youth - 0.27** Father Conflict-Youth 0.24* MotherConflict-Youth 0.26** Youth Father Discipline-Father - 0.23* Father ExtremeAutonomy-Youth 0.21* Mother Extreme Autonomy 0.24* Youth Fat her ExtremeAutonomy-Father 0.17+ (Table proceeds) Correlation Coefficients among ScaleMeasures and Frequency of Past Year Adolescent Marijuana Use Scale MeasuresAdolescent Marijuana Use Father Rules-Youth - 0.25* Mother Rules-Youth - 0.29**Youth Mother Rules-Father - 0.44*** Youth Father Rules-Father - 0.22* Father TimeSpent-Youth - 0.17+ Mother Time Spent-Youth - 0.35*** Youth Mother TimeSpent-Father - 0.24* Youth Father Time Spent-Father - 0.22* MotherSimilarity-Youth - 0.33*** Mother Emulation-Youth - 0.37*** Father Emulation-Youth-0.20* +p * 0.1 ; *p * 0.05 ; **p * 0.01 ; ***p * 0.001. This table comprises ofonly the scales fundamentally identified with the juvenile weed utilization with theexception of father AIDS. From the table above, we see that the more noteworthy thefathers pot utilization the more continuous his kid will utilize pot. Aclose parent-kid shared connection, the more profound respect, love, warmth,and kid centerness the youngster feel from the guardians, the l ess incessant thechild will utilize pot. The more prominent the contention is between the guardians isassociated with the childs increasingly visit utilization of pot. In respects toparenting factors, the more noteworthy the mother, father extraordinary self-sufficiency or morelenient, the more regular the kid will utilize maryjane. It bodes well then tosee that the more order the dad fortifies, the more outlandish his childwill use weed. Moreover, the more noteworthy the fortification of the mother,father rules, the less regular the youngster will utilize weed. Particularly themother rules. It may be a result of the way that larger part of the childrenresides with the moms. All things considered, we see that the additional time the motherspent with the youngster is emphatically related with less successive immature marijuanause and the additional time the dad went through with the kid will likewise help to reducethe recurrence of childs weed utilization. The equivalent goes to moth er similarityand guardians copying with mother having the most grounded impact on the reductionof childs pot use. Associations of Father and Youth Risk-ProtectiveVariables: A progression of relapse investigations was run in which a variable from onedomain was entered first then a variable from another space, trailed by theinteraction term (e.g., father AIDS status by one of the child rearing factors). Iwill examine just the huge communications, p * 0.05, since the others willnot give any significant data. In all cases, the reliant variable wasthe past year recurrence of juvenile weed use. The principal set of regressiondone was by taking dad AIDS status and connects with each of the parentingvariables. In spite of the fact that the dads AIDS status didn't rise as a significantmain impact on the childs pot use, it showed essentialness in thepresence of two different factors. The two critical communication regressionanalyses are: Father AIDS Status by Father Child-centerness and Fathe r AIDSStatus by Time Spent with Mother. For the situation that the dad doesn't haveAIDS, the viability of father youngster centerness (high or low), would not make

Letting Go Dealing with the Death of a Loved One

Letting Go Dealing with the Death of a Loved One The atmosphere at Suncoast Hospice is so thick it’s hard to breathe. The indoor lighting glows  soft and placid. My chair sits  next to Mom’s bed, her small living quarters decorated with miscellanea, niceties strategically placed to make her feel at home: picture frames, artwork, and the like. A glossy wall calendar,  flipped to October 2009, hangs tacked to a sun-faded corkboard. Next to us, a complex machine with a pixelated LED screen is set up to monitor Moms  vitals. The machine is switched off. Tears burn my cheeks. I’m crying for the first time in my adult life. A picture of Mom and me, the two of us smiling on a beach, is perched on the nightstand. She’s wearing a smile and a blonde wig in the photo. *   *   * This morning I received a call to let me know that things had taken a turn. I better fly down, the nurse said. She tried to put Mom on the phone, but her speech was incoherent. She sounded unlike I’ve ever heard her, unlike I’ve ever heard anyone. Like a dying character from a bad movie, droning and gurgling, emitting vague sounds, not words. I told Mom I loved her and hung up the phone and then booked a flight from Dayton to Tampa and called Ryan to drive me to the airport. I had spoken with Mom just yesterday. Her words then were slurred but semi-intelligible, and she was still conscious. Her short-term memory had been gone for at least a few months, ever since her cancer had metastasized beyond her lungs to her other vital organs and, eventually, to her brain, but her long-term memory seemed intact, everything still there, the good times and the bad, everything from our past frozen in time. I sat in the passenger seat in Ryan’s truck as he shuttled me wordlessly to Dayton International, my thoughts swirling under traveling Midwest skies. We were driving north on Terminal Drive, less than a mile from the airport, when I received the call. Mom was pronounced dead at 2:47 this afternoon, October 8, 2009. Ryan hugged me and I boarded my plane. The cab ride from Tampa to St. Petersburg was navigated by a friendly black man in his mid-forties, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a good friend’s smile. His radio spat out back-to-back Michael Jackson tunes. “You OK, man?” he asked, sensing my mood. “My mother’s dying.” I couldn’t speak about her in the past tense; I hadn’t even seen her body. Yet. “I’m sorry, brother,” he said with condolence, turning up the radio to help me cope. “You Are Not Alone,” played through the speakers, and MJ reassured me throughout the rest of the drive. *   *   * It is almost 7 p.m. now, last light draining from the Florida sky outside Mom’s Suncoast window, sunset coming through the blinds in long repetitive slats. I’ve been here less than five minutes. Peace radiates from Mom’s benevolent face, though it feels too cold to touch, not cold coldâ€"not icyâ€"but it lacks life, the temperature of an object, not a person. My sobs are uncontrollable. I don’t even notice their arrival until they’re already there, a natural reaction, like chemicals mixing to form an explosion, or tectonic plates shifting, an earth tremor of emotion. She’s tiny, lying there, fragile and small, as if her gigantic personality never extended to the size of her body. I want to hug her, to lift her frail, wilted body and hold her, to somehow bring her back to life, back to this world, and tell her I love her, tell her I’m sorry and that I didn’t know what to do and that I wasn’t the grown-up man I pretended to be, wasn’t as strong as she assumed I was. I want to tell her that I would have done things differently. I want to yell this at her, at everyone. It seems we don’t know how to love the ones we love until they disappear from our lives. “I’m sorry,” I say through the sobs. My shirt is wet. The room is inhabited by just me and what’s left of my mother, her flesh but not her. She’s not missing, she’s just not here anymore. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I repeat, rocking back and forth in my chair, a mental patient’s sway. I can feel the wreckage on my features. The tears are a strange catharsis, a release of every spasm of guilt and rage and regret. But they are also a departure for me, these tears, a turning of a page I didn’t know needed to be turned. Eventually I have to leave; there’s nothing left for me to say or do. I’m all out of tears, and so I hop a cab to Mom’s building. Her second-floor apartment is filled with at least three apartments’ worth of stuff. So much stuff. It’s not a hoarder’s home, but there are a lot of material possessions, sixty-four years of accumulation. Everything, especially her hulking antique furniture wedged beneath dwarfish ceilings, seems too large for the space it occupies, like something out of a Tolkien novel. The livingroom is festooned with sentiment: dozens of framed photographs, overstuffed photo albums, artwork she has owned since I was a child. Ornamental embellishments have colonized every corner, nook, and alcove. Handmade white doilies cover most flat surfacesâ€"more doilies than I can count. Adjacent to the livingroom is Mom’s kitchen, where cabinets are stuffed with several eras of mismatched plates and bowls and coffee cups. Every drawer is under the dominion of ill-assorted utensils. Inside the bathroom, a decade of makeup lives in a wicker basket next to the toilet, above which the shelves are neatly organized with enough hygiene products to start a small beauty-supply business. When I open the linen closet to assess its contents, I’m faced with stacks of mismatched bath towels and dish towels and beach towels, bed sheets and blankets and quilts. It looks like someone is running a hotel out of this tiny closet. I haven’t even glanced at the bedroom yet. Suddenly, it occurs to me for the first time: I have to figure out what to do with all this stuff. I sit on the couch and look around. Stand up again. Look around. Take it all in again and then close my eyes, breathe in through my nostrils. It smells like potpourriâ€"fennel and rosemary. I walk over to her stereo, a hand-me-down from my teenage days. I have only one CD here, Stray Age by Kentucky-born singer-songwriter  Daniel Martin Moore. I place it in the stereo and play the fifth track, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes.” I’ve listened to this album every time I’ve visited Momâ€"seven trips, seven different weeks this year. Moore croons optimistically over a soft piano-and-acoustic-guitar instrumental, “Ah but you know, it’s time for her to go.” It’s dark through Mom’s window. The lights of downtown St. Pete lead to the Bay, a sliver of which I can see from the livingroom. The water reflects the night sky, leaving everything bathed in a thousand hues of dark blue that stretch beyond the horizon. I sink into the ash-color couch, exhausted and unsure of what to do next. I close my eyes. When I finally peel open my eyelids hours later, I’m blinded by every bright surface. The morning sun angles through the windows, obnoxiously spotlighting my face and the objects in the room, casting shadows indiscriminately on everything that is beautiful and everything that is not. The white walls are screaming in the Florida sun. Everything appears bleached. I need a coffee and several ibuprofen. According to the woman on the phone, they don’t have a big enough U-Haul in stock. She says I’ll have to wait until tomorrow, which is fine; I have plenty of packing to do today, starting with the brimming bedroom closet. Why does she have so many winter coats? Doesn’t she live in Florida! I mean didn’tâ€"didn’t she live in Florida? I feel a pang of sadness. Surely she didn’t wear any of these high heels. And pant suits? Really, Mom? Pant suits! When was the last time you wore a pant suit? And it’s mind-boggling to see all these blouses with price tags still attached. Here are two bathrobes, unworn, “SALE!” tags still dangling like a friendly reminder of wasted money. Although I guess I can’t point the finger, can I? I too own a lot of clothes I don’t wear, a lot of shit I don’t use. What am I going to do with all this stuff? I mean, I don’t want to co-mingle Mom’s stuff with my stuff, so that’s out of the question. My wife  and I already have our house thronged with our own personal effects: our livingroom furniture in the livingroom, our bedroom furniture in the bedroom(s), our entertainment-room furniture in our … well, you get the picture. I don’t even have room in our vast basement, not with all the bins and boxes and assorted plastic storage containers from the Container Store. Another phone conversation reveals that a storage locker in Ohio, one big enough to store (most of) Mom’s possessions, is “only” a hundred twenty bucks a month. I’m not great at math, but my back-of-the-napkin arithmetic unveils an annual fee that approaches fifteen hundred dollars. Not exactly a bargain, but I guess you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, right? The contents under Mom’s high-rise Queen Anne bed look like they were pulled from a bad mystery novel. There are several wicker baskets (picnic baskets?) filled with stained, off-white table linens (she didn’t even own a diningroom table). Nearby, a boxed wedding dress takes up several cubic feet. Is it her dress? I hope notâ€"my parents divorced in 1984, a thousand miles from here. And what are these? Three boxes oddly labeled 3, 4, and 1. They look like cases of old printer paper, kind of heavy. The cardboard is sealed with layers of brown tape. Here’s a fourth box, numbered with a large numeral 2. Ah-hah! Rearranging the boxes uncloaks the climax of this Dan Brownâ€"esque mystery: 1, 2, 3, 4. But what is inside these boxes? The first box reveals the same contents as the second, which contains the same as the last two boxes: old elementary-school paperwork. My elementary-school paperwork, four years of it, grades (you guessed it) one through four, each box littered with English, math, science, and more English writings (as it turns out, I wasn’t that great at English, although my prepubescent handwriting is somehow better than my present-day hieroglyphics). Case closed. But here’s the real mystery: Why? Why was Mom hanging on to decades-old schoolwork? She obviously wasn’t getting any value from it. After all, the boxes were sealed, unaccessed for twenty years, just sitting there, tree bark in a box. If she were here, she’d probably tell me she was holding on to a piece of me in the boxes. But how? I was never in these boxes. I didn’t even know they existed until this moment. And yet she thought she could keep a piece of meâ€"memories of meâ€"by keeping these things. This thought infuriates me. Our memories are not in our things. Our memories are in us. But wait a minute: Aren’t I doing the same thing with her stuff? Except instead of little boxes under my bed, I’m going to squirrel away all her bits and pieces in a gigantic box with a padlock. And just like her, I will, in all likelihood, leave it there, sealed for a score in an edge-of-town storage locker, the final resting place for her belongings. Faced with this realization, I pick up my phone and dial. “Thank you for calling U-Haul, your moving and storage resource. My name is Randi. How may I help you?” “I need to cancel a truck. ” *   *   * I was wearing a jacket when I left Ohio two weeks ago, but there’s no need for one in Florida. It’s still middle-of-summer hot here, scorching for mid-October: ninety-eight degrees, ninety-five percent relative humidity, air so thick that my hair parts in strange ways and frizzes like it’s mad at me. I’m sweating just thinking about going outside. I’ve spent the last twelve days divesting myself of Mom’s property: her furniture, her clothes, even her supply of doilies, all of it sold and donated to help the charities that assisted her through nine months of chemo and radiation. Into the heat of this morning comes peace, an ineffable weight lifted. I call a shuttle to drive me to the airport where Ryan will be waiting for me on the other side of my flight. I’m headed home with a few  boxes of photographs and many years of memories inside me. Before I exit the apartment, I turn around and take one last look at the empty space, staring into the vastness of everything that’s gone. The stereo is no longer there, but Daniel Martin Moore still plays in my head, “Ah but you know, it’s time for him to go.” Perhaps this is my Stray Age. Someone once told me that our bodies’ cells regenerate every seven years, making us completely new people at seven-year intervals. I’m twenty-eight now. Maybe this is my fourth regeneration, my chance at a new start, an opportunity to be kinder to what I’ve been given, for that’s all there is, and the meter is running. Letting Go is an excerpt from  Everything That Remains.

Letting Go Dealing with the Death of a Loved One

Letting Go Dealing with the Death of a Loved One The atmosphere at Suncoast Hospice is so thick it’s hard to breathe. The indoor lighting glows  soft and placid. My chair sits  next to Mom’s bed, her small living quarters decorated with miscellanea, niceties strategically placed to make her feel at home: picture frames, artwork, and the like. A glossy wall calendar,  flipped to October 2009, hangs tacked to a sun-faded corkboard. Next to us, a complex machine with a pixelated LED screen is set up to monitor Moms  vitals. The machine is switched off. Tears burn my cheeks. I’m crying for the first time in my adult life. A picture of Mom and me, the two of us smiling on a beach, is perched on the nightstand. She’s wearing a smile and a blonde wig in the photo. *   *   * This morning I received a call to let me know that things had taken a turn. I better fly down, the nurse said. She tried to put Mom on the phone, but her speech was incoherent. She sounded unlike I’ve ever heard her, unlike I’ve ever heard anyone. Like a dying character from a bad movie, droning and gurgling, emitting vague sounds, not words. I told Mom I loved her and hung up the phone and then booked a flight from Dayton to Tampa and called Ryan to drive me to the airport. I had spoken with Mom just yesterday. Her words then were slurred but semi-intelligible, and she was still conscious. Her short-term memory had been gone for at least a few months, ever since her cancer had metastasized beyond her lungs to her other vital organs and, eventually, to her brain, but her long-term memory seemed intact, everything still there, the good times and the bad, everything from our past frozen in time. I sat in the passenger seat in Ryan’s truck as he shuttled me wordlessly to Dayton International, my thoughts swirling under traveling Midwest skies. We were driving north on Terminal Drive, less than a mile from the airport, when I received the call. Mom was pronounced dead at 2:47 this afternoon, October 8, 2009. Ryan hugged me and I boarded my plane. The cab ride from Tampa to St. Petersburg was navigated by a friendly black man in his mid-forties, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a good friend’s smile. His radio spat out back-to-back Michael Jackson tunes. “You OK, man?” he asked, sensing my mood. “My mother’s dying.” I couldn’t speak about her in the past tense; I hadn’t even seen her body. Yet. “I’m sorry, brother,” he said with condolence, turning up the radio to help me cope. “You Are Not Alone,” played through the speakers, and MJ reassured me throughout the rest of the drive. *   *   * It is almost 7 p.m. now, last light draining from the Florida sky outside Mom’s Suncoast window, sunset coming through the blinds in long repetitive slats. I’ve been here less than five minutes. Peace radiates from Mom’s benevolent face, though it feels too cold to touch, not cold coldâ€"not icyâ€"but it lacks life, the temperature of an object, not a person. My sobs are uncontrollable. I don’t even notice their arrival until they’re already there, a natural reaction, like chemicals mixing to form an explosion, or tectonic plates shifting, an earth tremor of emotion. She’s tiny, lying there, fragile and small, as if her gigantic personality never extended to the size of her body. I want to hug her, to lift her frail, wilted body and hold her, to somehow bring her back to life, back to this world, and tell her I love her, tell her I’m sorry and that I didn’t know what to do and that I wasn’t the grown-up man I pretended to be, wasn’t as strong as she assumed I was. I want to tell her that I would have done things differently. I want to yell this at her, at everyone. It seems we don’t know how to love the ones we love until they disappear from our lives. “I’m sorry,” I say through the sobs. My shirt is wet. The room is inhabited by just me and what’s left of my mother, her flesh but not her. She’s not missing, she’s just not here anymore. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I repeat, rocking back and forth in my chair, a mental patient’s sway. I can feel the wreckage on my features. The tears are a strange catharsis, a release of every spasm of guilt and rage and regret. But they are also a departure for me, these tears, a turning of a page I didn’t know needed to be turned. Eventually I have to leave; there’s nothing left for me to say or do. I’m all out of tears, and so I hop a cab to Mom’s building. Her second-floor apartment is filled with at least three apartments’ worth of stuff. So much stuff. It’s not a hoarder’s home, but there are a lot of material possessions, sixty-four years of accumulation. Everything, especially her hulking antique furniture wedged beneath dwarfish ceilings, seems too large for the space it occupies, like something out of a Tolkien novel. The livingroom is festooned with sentiment: dozens of framed photographs, overstuffed photo albums, artwork she has owned since I was a child. Ornamental embellishments have colonized every corner, nook, and alcove. Handmade white doilies cover most flat surfacesâ€"more doilies than I can count. Adjacent to the livingroom is Mom’s kitchen, where cabinets are stuffed with several eras of mismatched plates and bowls and coffee cups. Every drawer is under the dominion of ill-assorted utensils. Inside the bathroom, a decade of makeup lives in a wicker basket next to the toilet, above which the shelves are neatly organized with enough hygiene products to start a small beauty-supply business. When I open the linen closet to assess its contents, I’m faced with stacks of mismatched bath towels and dish towels and beach towels, bed sheets and blankets and quilts. It looks like someone is running a hotel out of this tiny closet. I haven’t even glanced at the bedroom yet. Suddenly, it occurs to me for the first time: I have to figure out what to do with all this stuff. I sit on the couch and look around. Stand up again. Look around. Take it all in again and then close my eyes, breathe in through my nostrils. It smells like potpourriâ€"fennel and rosemary. I walk over to her stereo, a hand-me-down from my teenage days. I have only one CD here, Stray Age by Kentucky-born singer-songwriter  Daniel Martin Moore. I place it in the stereo and play the fifth track, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes.” I’ve listened to this album every time I’ve visited Momâ€"seven trips, seven different weeks this year. Moore croons optimistically over a soft piano-and-acoustic-guitar instrumental, “Ah but you know, it’s time for her to go.” It’s dark through Mom’s window. The lights of downtown St. Pete lead to the Bay, a sliver of which I can see from the livingroom. The water reflects the night sky, leaving everything bathed in a thousand hues of dark blue that stretch beyond the horizon. I sink into the ash-color couch, exhausted and unsure of what to do next. I close my eyes. When I finally peel open my eyelids hours later, I’m blinded by every bright surface. The morning sun angles through the windows, obnoxiously spotlighting my face and the objects in the room, casting shadows indiscriminately on everything that is beautiful and everything that is not. The white walls are screaming in the Florida sun. Everything appears bleached. I need a coffee and several ibuprofen. According to the woman on the phone, they don’t have a big enough U-Haul in stock. She says I’ll have to wait until tomorrow, which is fine; I have plenty of packing to do today, starting with the brimming bedroom closet. Why does she have so many winter coats? Doesn’t she live in Florida! I mean didn’tâ€"didn’t she live in Florida? I feel a pang of sadness. Surely she didn’t wear any of these high heels. And pant suits? Really, Mom? Pant suits! When was the last time you wore a pant suit? And it’s mind-boggling to see all these blouses with price tags still attached. Here are two bathrobes, unworn, “SALE!” tags still dangling like a friendly reminder of wasted money. Although I guess I can’t point the finger, can I? I too own a lot of clothes I don’t wear, a lot of shit I don’t use. What am I going to do with all this stuff? I mean, I don’t want to co-mingle Mom’s stuff with my stuff, so that’s out of the question. My wife  and I already have our house thronged with our own personal effects: our livingroom furniture in the livingroom, our bedroom furniture in the bedroom(s), our entertainment-room furniture in our … well, you get the picture. I don’t even have room in our vast basement, not with all the bins and boxes and assorted plastic storage containers from the Container Store. Another phone conversation reveals that a storage locker in Ohio, one big enough to store (most of) Mom’s possessions, is “only” a hundred twenty bucks a month. I’m not great at math, but my back-of-the-napkin arithmetic unveils an annual fee that approaches fifteen hundred dollars. Not exactly a bargain, but I guess you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, right? The contents under Mom’s high-rise Queen Anne bed look like they were pulled from a bad mystery novel. There are several wicker baskets (picnic baskets?) filled with stained, off-white table linens (she didn’t even own a diningroom table). Nearby, a boxed wedding dress takes up several cubic feet. Is it her dress? I hope notâ€"my parents divorced in 1984, a thousand miles from here. And what are these? Three boxes oddly labeled 3, 4, and 1. They look like cases of old printer paper, kind of heavy. The cardboard is sealed with layers of brown tape. Here’s a fourth box, numbered with a large numeral 2. Ah-hah! Rearranging the boxes uncloaks the climax of this Dan Brownâ€"esque mystery: 1, 2, 3, 4. But what is inside these boxes? The first box reveals the same contents as the second, which contains the same as the last two boxes: old elementary-school paperwork. My elementary-school paperwork, four years of it, grades (you guessed it) one through four, each box littered with English, math, science, and more English writings (as it turns out, I wasn’t that great at English, although my prepubescent handwriting is somehow better than my present-day hieroglyphics). Case closed. But here’s the real mystery: Why? Why was Mom hanging on to decades-old schoolwork? She obviously wasn’t getting any value from it. After all, the boxes were sealed, unaccessed for twenty years, just sitting there, tree bark in a box. If she were here, she’d probably tell me she was holding on to a piece of me in the boxes. But how? I was never in these boxes. I didn’t even know they existed until this moment. And yet she thought she could keep a piece of meâ€"memories of meâ€"by keeping these things. This thought infuriates me. Our memories are not in our things. Our memories are in us. But wait a minute: Aren’t I doing the same thing with her stuff? Except instead of little boxes under my bed, I’m going to squirrel away all her bits and pieces in a gigantic box with a padlock. And just like her, I will, in all likelihood, leave it there, sealed for a score in an edge-of-town storage locker, the final resting place for her belongings. Faced with this realization, I pick up my phone and dial. “Thank you for calling U-Haul, your moving and storage resource. My name is Randi. How may I help you?” “I need to cancel a truck. ” *   *   * I was wearing a jacket when I left Ohio two weeks ago, but there’s no need for one in Florida. It’s still middle-of-summer hot here, scorching for mid-October: ninety-eight degrees, ninety-five percent relative humidity, air so thick that my hair parts in strange ways and frizzes like it’s mad at me. I’m sweating just thinking about going outside. I’ve spent the last twelve days divesting myself of Mom’s property: her furniture, her clothes, even her supply of doilies, all of it sold and donated to help the charities that assisted her through nine months of chemo and radiation. Into the heat of this morning comes peace, an ineffable weight lifted. I call a shuttle to drive me to the airport where Ryan will be waiting for me on the other side of my flight. I’m headed home with a few  boxes of photographs and many years of memories inside me. Before I exit the apartment, I turn around and take one last look at the empty space, staring into the vastness of everything that’s gone. The stereo is no longer there, but Daniel Martin Moore still plays in my head, “Ah but you know, it’s time for him to go.” Perhaps this is my Stray Age. Someone once told me that our bodies’ cells regenerate every seven years, making us completely new people at seven-year intervals. I’m twenty-eight now. Maybe this is my fourth regeneration, my chance at a new start, an opportunity to be kinder to what I’ve been given, for that’s all there is, and the meter is running. Letting Go is an excerpt from  Everything That Remains.