The Rightsizing Ruse
written by: Mary Heeran White
The boxes were packed and stacked, taped firmly, with an indelible ink scrawl chronicling a lifetime of cherished possessions. Every taped bundle spoke of moments, memories – each a carefully curated piece in the vivid mosaic of our lives.
In those hectic days, as the nesting instinct kicked in, our home expanded, one choreographed and colour-graded piece of content at a time.
Packing each thought-out and integrated part of our shared story, I found myself overwhelmed with gratitude for this space – a love so profound for the life we built together.
Thirty years into our marriage, 2021, John’s decline crept in with the subtlety of twilight. At first, he lost hours just staring out our kitchen window at a world increasingly incomprehensible to him. The fatigue we couldn’t fathom, his changed personality, and confusion in familiar situations – his memory loss and struggle to find the right words – led to a referral letter from our GP to a neurologist.
Then came the verdict, a whispered diagnosis that crashed through our world like thunder.
“Dementia.”
As I listened in disbelief, Dr. Nazime weaved an explanation in an attempt to ease our path to comprehending the incomprehensible.
“The filing cabinets in his mind are dissolving in the swirl of memories he keeps trying to grasp.”
It was like a summons had come for a crime we hadn’t committed. John stared into space as I wrestled with conflicting emotions, unsure of how to navigate this new chapter of our lives. Yet, I was desperate to start the journey that would return him to me.
His body bore the initial brunt, his mind easier to mask until the disorder of his thoughts began to mimic the dysfunction of his limp frame. After thirty blissful years of relatively good health, this three-dimensional man faded from technicolour. The stream of our conversation, always overflowing, had tragically run dry until there was nothing left to say. I couldn’t bear how he stared at me with the detached curiosity of a stranger, and my pride blushed with embarrassment from the relentless onslaught of his transformed ramblings.
One morning, when we had just filled the dishwasher together and turned the knob to eco wash, he began to pack his overnight bag, with a map, a toothbrush, and a pair of socks, and walked out the front door.
“I’ll be off now, then,” he said.
“Where to?”
“Just off,” he replied, his tone cryptic. “I want to do a bit of living while I still can.”
Don’t we all? The mortgage was paid, both children were safely in their twenties, and all the hurdles of life had been jumped.
I stood mute in the doorway as he drifted towards the end of the drive, my need to keep a watchful eye born from a constant fear that he might wander off to unfamiliar territory and lose his way, or worse.
Since diagnosis, these strange interludes had become common in our day-to-day existence. The sense of internal rupture wasn’t easy to deal with. A desire to scream took hold, although I didn’t make a sound. Instead, I became addicted to Doctor Google, desperate for reassurance among grim statistics. I flipped through books, emailed strangers, hoping to find a mirror.
One author replied: “All the answers are in my book.” Her words stung – too neat – and her greed to pocket profit on my grief infuriated me.
John’s sister, Sheila, rang that night, as expected. “He’s still here, Moya,” she said, her voice soft.
I released a silent sigh. “I suspected he might be.”
Next morning, he returned, dragging his bewilderment behind him.
“I’m sorry,” he said by rote, his eyes looking past me as Sheila drove away.
Prior to this, John’s day always started at 6 a.m. His morning energy was not unlike the River Fergus that barrels through our back garden – rapid, turbulent, free-flowing, and always churning. I could feel the energy lifting off him, like atoms peeling away from his shoulders, regenerating even as they dissipated. Now, lethargy dragged him to lie back into the sofa cushions as the mystery of his illness deepened.
Our daily dialogue brought a new language of indifference between us, convincing me that I wasn’t the main character in his life story anymore. But the moment the pharmacist popped in with his tablets or the postman asked after his roses, he’d come alive.
He remembered their names, their children, their ailments. Mr Kavanagh from the butcher’s could arrive with stir-fry beef for the weekend, and John would beam like he’d won the lotto.
“You’ve great hands,” he once said, squeezing Kavanagh’s shoulder like a comrade. “You always knew the right cut.”
Even Oisín from the pub got more warmth than I did some days.
It hurt, how his mind made room for them while mine became a corridor he seldom walked down.
Next day, we sat and had our lunchtime sandwiches at the kitchen table.
Afterwards, he took a few measured steps to the window and leaned his palms on the sill. I hoped he wouldn’t comment on the tangle of his once-pristine garden, the plot from which he had coaxed so many seasons of fruits and vegetables for our larder. Repeated promises from neighbours and family to tame the expanding jungle resulted in duty visits followed by a series of quick hellos and goodbyes.
Thankfully, his attention turned to the rows of family photographs hanging on the wall, all framed and mounted by him. Yet, he studied each one as though seeing it for the first time. His eyes brightened, then darkened, his expression seesawing between cognition and confusion. He murmured something about our girls, and my ears filled with their shrill toddler voices calling out in the garden as they raced barefoot around the lawn, and the tinny, rhythmic thump, thump of the trampoline, interspersed with bursts of spontaneous giggles.
Leaving him to the mercy of his memory, I tiptoed back to the kitchen sink and tidied up. I looked at the old familiar curve of the fireside bucket chairs that enveloped us on winter evenings and wondered at what point they’d become so integral to our existence. Or the vintage swirling glass vase on the walnut sideboard, handed down through generations, that never failed to draw gasps from visitors.
When had the kitchen table morphed into the nucleus of our life together? It had become our shelter in the rain, our parasol in the sun, where we gathered with joy and sorrow, gave thanks, celebrated christenings, communions, confirmations, weddings, prepared our parents for burial, sang with joy, with sorrow, laughing and crying, eating the last sweet bite together. Tears flooded from nowhere as I wiped the worktop clean.
All of a sudden, it felt as if our lives had become an unruly bundle of sticks, crying out to be repurposed into a rustic centrepiece, arranged neatly in the heart of some efficiently designed, ground-floor dwelling.
Downsizing felt like betrayal. Rightsizing sounded like a social construct in disguise.
Whoever came up with the term ‘downsizing’, anyway? As if, upon reaching a certain age and life stage, we must be ‘cut down to size’, the walls of our living space shunted in like the jaws of a vice.
Any sense of peace in leaving our home continued to elude me, despite the repeated reminders from do-gooders on the merits of our move. The dread of internal rupture haunted me daily, yet I could see no solution to the puzzle.
Perhaps it’s an elaborate conspiracy? Who decided that the measured articulation of our limbs, the absence of sudden movement, disorientation, or lack of awareness, somehow meant we no longer needed the joys of our familiar surroundings?
Thereafter, the magnitude of Housing Adaptation, Mobility Adaptation, Age-Friendly literature bombarded us. I couldn’t bear it. Paranoia threatened to overwhelm me, so I popped a newly prescribed Xanax, and let it sand down the sharper edges of my day. The irony didn’t escape me – sedating my own mind to survive the slow disintegration of John’s.
Yet, after decades in Donnybrook, where every corner held a memory, and each neighbor knew our names, we were urged to consider ‘rightsizing’. The government had developed new age-friendly homes in Templeogue village – modern, efficient, but unfamiliar. Their promise was a better fit for our needs, but the cost was leaving behind the tapestry of our lives. None of it took into account John’s grappling with cognitive challenges.
The sound of him shouting my name shattered my reverie. Dashing towards him, I had no time to address the flurry of questions roiling inside me at his sudden burst of anxiety. He stood, tears in his eyes, feverishly pointing out the bay window and telling me to look at our two daughters racing their bikes down the drive.
At that moment, I felt the embodied energy of the girls’ childhood years as a lingering resonance inside the house. I could almost hear the soundtrack of later teenage years: the slamming of doors, followed by the trail through the kitchen towards the fridge, headphones creating a booming wall of silence.
John took my hand and muttered something about how it wouldn’t be long until the girls needed bigger bikes. I shuddered against the bony chill of his grip as the neighbours’ children peddled out of sight.
The truth was, I did not want any of this. I grappled with the reality that our once-beloved abode, with its sprawling grounds and echoing hallways, had become too vast for us to manage. Yet, as I glanced around at the packed boxes and taped-up memories, I found myself torn between the urge to hold onto our cherished past and the silent acknowledgement that change was inevitable. It was a delicate dance of emotions – a balancing act between nostalgia and necessity.
As the moving van idled by the kerb, neighbours lined the pavement like mourners at a quiet funeral.
Mr Kavanagh, the butcher, pressed a foil-wrapped stir-fry into John’s hands. “Best beef, same cut you always liked. Just heat and eat tonight.”
Oisín from the pub clapped him on the back. “To the best regular I never had to throw out.”
Even the pharmacist passed me a discreet paper bag. “I’ll transfer you to our branch over there. I’ll make sure they look after you.”
Dr. Nazime had already arranged a clinic close by, with a new doctor.
“He won’t know me,” John had whispered that morning, folding and refolding his jumper. “Not like Nazime does.”
Then Mrs Donnelly arrived with a box of eclairs from Best Cakes. “For your tea – something sweet for the road.”
John blinked, his brows furrowed. “Tell her I’ll have the carrot cake next week.” This was said as if our world hadn’t shifted.
When I started the car, the emptiness echoed – a hush so deep it felt like mourning. I hadn’t known grief like it since burying my parents.
A last glance back brought an unyielding ache of solitude. As the heat of late summer gave way to autumn’s chill, a blanket of damp descended on our once-manicured garden. Beech leaves assumed their hues of gold, amber, and copper, and in a final kaleidoscopic display, crinkled and yielded to the earth. I sensed a gathering in as nature closed down to prepare for the rest period of winter. Always a comforting cycle, full of promise that this is not the end, but a time of transition until spring comes again and all will emerge triumphant.
Glancing towards John, I sensed no hope of spring.
We entered our downsized home, but the great drama of our lives together was not evident anywhere. Standing in clutter’s thrall, we began unpacking, each dismantled relic plucked from our past, dredging up memories of the life we had meticulously constructed.
“What do you think, John?”
“Nirvana,” he replied, peeling the tape from the treasures of our lives – like a child unwrapping a precious gift.
Somehow, his boyish delight helped me bear the ache of letting go.
- The Rightsizing Ruse - January 6, 2026
