The Blue Chair

Norm, my friend (and long-ago partner) of 52 years, died on February 18 of this year. On August 24, the last of his things left his condo. It was my responsibility to clear it out, and it was a long, long process because I probably subconsciously dragged my feet for a lot of it. At last I had The Brown Elephant, a local thrift shop in Chicago's Boys Town, whose proceeds benefit the Howard Brown Medical Center, come over to clear it out. I was more than a little disturbed to learn when they got there that they are selective in what they will accept. My purpose was to empty the condo. They took perhaps 2/3 of it and left the rest.

Finally I made arrangements with another thrift shop willing to take the rest. I paid them to haul away those things which they felt they would not be able to resell, just to get rid of it.

The last item they removed was Norm's favorite blue recliner. The Brown Elephant had refused to take it because Norm's aptly named dog Jezebel had badly chewed one of the legs, though it was almost impossible to see unless you really looked. They really looked.

In the last year and a half of his life, when he was home between hospital and nursing home stays, every time I went over to see him, he would be sitting in his blue chair, sometimes taking a breathing treatment using a mask which delivered a fine mist of medication, but most of the time just sitting, doing nothing at all. By this time I had become resigned to the fact that the Norm I'd known all those years was pretty much gone, just going through the motions of living.

So Norm began disappearing even before he died, like air leaking from a punctured tire. But even afterwards, as his things were sorted through and packed and stacked and given away and sold, I could sense his presence. Every time I would glance at the blue chair, my mind would see him there.

It took the final clear-out team two trips to get rid of everything left in the condo, and as they were taking the next-to-the-last load down to the truck, I stood in the living room, now totally empty except for the blue chair. I went over and sat down, very uncharacteristically doing and thinking nothing. Just sitting as Norm had done the last year or so of his life. I realized that from the position of his chair, in one corner of the room, looking look out the sliding glass doors showed only the nondescript flatness of the city spread out to the west. Had the chair been almost anywhere else in the room, I (and he) could have looked out on the magnificent view of the sparkling lake and the towers of the Loop, glistening like the Emerald City of Oz in the distance.

And it struck me that each of us has the equivalent of a blue chair from which we look at the world, and where we choose to place it largely dictates our total perspective.

And when they came to get the chair, I had no choice but to accept the reality that when they carried that chair out the door, Norm and his 40 years of living there would be gone, and the door that had opened between us that warm August night in 1958, and remained open for more than 50 years, would be closed forever.

They picked up the chair, and I watched them leave, and when they were gone, I walked down the blank-walled hallway once lined with pictures and artwork to close the sliding glass doors in each of the empty bedrooms and den, turned off the lights in the bathroom, and left.

I've hired a cleaning crew to come in tomorrow to vacuum, clean the kitchen and bathrooms, and wash the windows, and I'll have to be there to let them in and close up after they're gone. I'll be there, but Norm won't.

It's called "Life."

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