Saturday, August 31, 2013

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Tonight's picture was taken in September of 2008. If I had to give this photo a title, it would be "have boxes will travel!" As you can see Mattie claimed three boxes at Georgetown University Hospital, taped them together and was walking down the hallway with them. There is no telling to how Mattie transformed these boxes, but I can assure you they most likely did not look this way for long. Mattie always had a plan and an idea behind his creations.






Quote of the day: Words are like nets -- we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder. ~ Jodi Picoult

As it is Labor Day weekend, with three days in which we will be home, I knew a plan was in order. Without a plan, Peter and I can easily get into a funk. So earlier in the week, I asked Peter if we could use this time to paint our living room and dining room. That may sound easy, but it is a huge undertaking, especially since I have furniture and collectibles everywhere. Before we went away to Europe, we actually picked out paint colors for every room in our home. We figured one by one, we would tackle this huge task in small dosages. In all reality our upstairs needs reorganization and order first. But frankly I decided to start painting downstairs in hopes that it would motivate me to manage upstairs. Upstairs is far more difficult because of Mattie's bedroom, which I haven't really touched since he died.

In the process of covering our furniture and floors today, we came across a plastic box that we shoveled underneath our dining room break front. We knew exactly what was in this box, but we just never dealt with it. Here are what the contents inside the box looked like! Do you know what they are?! Look closely! I am sure to most of my readers this looks like metal pieces, springs, and there are even things that look like metal loops and nails. However, these are NOT scrap parts. NOT AT ALL!!!! In actuality all of these parts came out of Mattie's body when he was cremated. As many of my faithful readers know, Mattie had four primary bone tumors. Which is VERY rare. With bone cancer, each of the infected bones must be removed from the body. In their place titanium structures were surgically implanted under Mattie's skin and attached to remaining bones. In Mattie's case, Repiphysis technology was used. If you are interested in knowing what that means, go to:
http://www.wmt.com/expandableimplant/patients/learn-about-repiphysis/what-is-repiphysis.asp

I finally removed all the metal pieces today and placed them into a new plastic bag. We put this bag with Mattie's ashes, which sit in our living room in an Italian marquetry jewelry box. I suppose we could have thrown these metal parts away, but that wasn't our decision. The fact that these items were even dealt with today seemed like a huge step.

Peter and I have been at it all day. Just taking pictures off the wall, moving furniture, and covering everything took a great deal of time. We have spent the majority of the day painting the ceilings. The ceilings haven't been touched in over 15 years, so they were more than overdue. But what an exhausting project. I took a picture of the painting chaos for you to see. Needless to say, you know what we will be doing ALL weekend! My hope is it will be worth it and that it will motivate me to continue the work upstairs!