"I Quit."

It's a hard thing: to go through the material possessions of a loved one and choose what you want to keep and what you don't. It's a hard thing when every single material possession holds a memory that you only just remembered when you saw that item. Items that you saw when they were alive and made you think, "what the Hell?" now makes you smile and laugh quietly as you look at them: silk flower parts, parts of a metal hanger, jugs of water from the well. You wonder what they were thinking when they kept these things, but it makes you smile for some reason.

I walked along my Pop's garage, an area where he used to create things, paint things. Things like Christmas decorations, lamps, ceramic pieces, flower boxes. There are tools. There is sawdust still on the floor from the last time he was out in the garage - three years ago at the earliest. I move gingerly over various objects that are now in the garage: the power wheelchair, the manual wheelchair, breathing machines, adult diapers. These are things that never were.

I walk over to his workbench, and I look over some things. I laugh at some things I find. I find a Dewar's tin box full of art supplies. I blow the dust off and find a Chivas tin box in the same condition - empty. As I turn to walk away, there he is. Turned upside down in the back of the workbench, I see two little black shoes staring at me. I pull away a piece of sandpaper, and there is a four-inch hand-whiddled sailor. I didn't even know that Pop whiddled. He is a stout little man. A sailor's hat, a seaman's beard, a weathered face, a little pea coat, pants, and black shoes. I smile at the little man I hold in my hand, and something catches my eye. I turn my little sailor over and read two words scratched into the wood with a permanent marker: "I QUIT."

Almost immediately, my memories and my smiles turn into sadness. I find myself fighting back the want to break into tears, but it's tough, and a few escape before I wipe my face with my t-shirt sleeve and blame it on sweat and heat. My throat feels as though I've swallowed some of that sawdust and sandpaper as well. My heart drops. The first thing that comes to mind is when my Pop knew he was not going to live much longer. He told my mom, "I hope she goes first. I don't want her having to live here alone without me." He was so worried about Nan and what was Nan going to do when he left.

A little over two years ago Pop was diagnosed with lung cancer, among other things. Well speed up the diagnosis a little bit, and he declined rapidly. He always knew who I was up until the end. Whenever I would go up to visit with he and Nan, he would always say, "go in that room over there and look here, there is [insert object here] - go ahead and take that." I realize now as I look back on those conversations that those were things he wanted me to have - no one else. Knowing that he was declining in health, he probably knew that there was no way he'd remember to tell me that or tell anyone else that or to give me something.

When my Pop died, he told my mom that at his memorial service, he wanted my mom to say one thing to his friends, "When you put that olive in your martini, think of me." My Pop loved martinis, but here was this sailor in my hand.

I gripped it tightly and stuffed his little wooden frame into my body. Pop didn't quit. Doctors gave him six months to live, or less, and by God, he wasn't going to live by ANY doctors' time schedule. Two years after that is when it was finally his time to leave this world. He never quit. He was too good for that.

My little wooden sailor sits in my bedroom on my dresser. I see him every day, and contrary to his scratch on the bottom of his shoes, I [won't] quit.