“I sure loved this place,” he said. “I’m really gonna miss it.”
And with that, my 80-year-old father-in-law leaned his crooked body — locked in a perpetual bow that seemed to signal the surrender of all that he once had and all that he once was — on a red cane and strode purposefully out the door of the Florida house he and my mother-in-law had called home for nearly 10 years.
Unable to sell the decades-old manufactured home in a tidy senior community of other cutout cottages, he wasn’t just walking out of the house. He was walking away from it. For good.
He and I had removed the items of value left in the house — the appraisals based more on sentiment than resale potential — and packed them into his black Ford Taurus for the trip back to North Carolina. Before we drove away early on Labor Day morning, we stopped at the community’s business office, where my father-in-law dropped an envelope in the mailbox. Inside the envelope were the ownership papers for the house.
The same house that he had paid off and now owned free and clear. The same house that he was now giving away because he, like millions of other struggling
Americans in a slumping economy, simply couldn’t afford to own it anymore.
The $300 a month it cost for the home to sit on its patch of sand and St. Augustine grass in the senior community had become more than he could afford. The tanking stock market had drained his retirement fund so fast, you could almost see Satan sitting there with an adding machine as he laughed hysterically.
The funds that were supposed to support my in-laws for the rest of their lives were now calculated not in dollars, but in the months that remained before there was nothing left at all.
This proud man who had owned his own company, who can drive through our nation’s heartland and point out the countless grain elevators and seed plants, rising like castles on the horizon, and recall how he designed and built them, now owns absolutely nothing. His children own the house he lives in and the car he drives, or he would have no house or car at all.
As we drove the nine hours from the Atlantic Coast of Florida back to North Carolina on Labor Day, my father-in-law mesmerized me (as he always does) with his stories. And though he is increasingly frail, he humbled me (as he also always does) with his brilliance.
This is a man who (like me) majored in journalism in college but (very unlike me) became a self-taught engineer. His mind is a bottomless mine of hard-earned knowledge and time-honored wisdom. Dementia has begun to send fissures through the walls of that mind, but the treasures within it remain. If only those intellectual riches could still translate into monetary ones.
As I drove and my father-in-law napped, I was both saddened and angered by the unfairness of it all. How could a man who had so much now have nothing? But the other part of my father-inlaw that amazes me is his faith, and for him, that translates into trust — an unbreakable certainty that no matter how bad things are, they will get better.
It might not happen in a house of tin in the heat of Florida, in a cornfield in Illinois, or even in a borrowed home in North Carolina. But things will get better. In this life, or in the next one.
