Topic: A not-so-everyday object

Author: Chris Dunn

You probably don’t know it, but the saddest object in the universe sits in a wall socket at the top of my parent’s staircase. It’s a Dyson V7 Motorhead Cord Free Vacuum, and it’s sweet – as a vacuum that is. For what it represents, though, it’s sad.

I had been living alone for several months – that’s not the sad part. My friends had all finally moved on into their adult lives with the spouses and the children, and I had inherited the hippy house by rules of last-man-standing and was finally settling into accepting that the place was truly mine, my responsibility, do with as I willed. So, it was in that mindset that the commercial found me. Crisp, clean, smiling people clearing away filth and debris with alarming ease, be it under a long, low sofa or hiding in a high, ceilinged corner. The price tag was steep, but the joy in their effortless cleaning seemed worth it. And I was starting to do well at my new job. My old vacuum sucked, and not in the good way. I deserved and upgrade!

Amazon makes it so easy to commit before you’ve fully considered, and two days later, I had my very own Dyson V6 Animal Cord-free Vacuum, and it was sweet! Maybe I didn’t have the exact same joie de vivre that the people being paid to vacuum showed, but it was still miles better than my old crusty vacuum with its bags and what not. You know those things are a horror to deal with, or so the commercial had told me. Sure, it had its issues – like a 15-minute battery life at max power and a near constant need to clean the roller brush of cat and Chris hairs - but the way the carpets felt under my bare feet - it was totally worth it.

I was so impressed I told my mom about it. Gushing like an infomercial crossbred with a carnival barker, I extolled its virtues to her bemused expression. Something about her son raving about the joys of vacuuming made her smile. It was good to see her smile. She had been sick for some time, and I had taken to visiting her a few times a week to see how she was coming along, catching her up with stories about my new job and the assorted, motley characters who populate the periphery of my existence (more on them in other stories). She always brightened at my visits.

The Dyson company owes me a commission, because the next week when I came over, there atop the stairs in its own place of prominence was the V7. I commented on it, and my mom was quick to point out that she had been moved by my pitch AND that hers was the next step up from mine. She was really looking forward to using it once she was back on her feet and feeling fit again.

That’s where the sadness comes in. She never got that chance. My father went in to have his knee replaced, and while he was rehabbing at a facility, her condition continued to worsen. She became confused and distant. We would bring her to see him and she would sit quietly in the corner looking lost. I continued to treat, what at the time we thought was back pain, by applying these little electro-pads to her bare skin, turning on a mild current and letting her sit for fifteen minutes at a time while I wandered the neighborhood. She complained of numbness and carpal tunnel, but what it turned out to be was cancer and kidney failure.

She went into the hospital before my dad got out. I brought him home to an empty house. It was his turn to look confused. In and out of the intensive care units and long term facilities, she eventually recovered enough from the kidney failure to interact with her family like her old self, but she never found the strength to use that vacuum. Instead, they had to have a chair lift installed to carry her to the second floor, when she had the strength to bother making the trip.

Did she see it? Hanging there as the slow-rising chair brought it mockingly into view? Did it taunt her with the hubris of her plans, the thought that she was going to continue? Because that’s all she wanted to do, to go on and serve others, to keep her house clean and ready to receive. She wasn’t ready.

As the doctor’s grim prognostication slowly became real, I drove her to the infusion center on a white, winter’s day. I remember noting how the wind swept the snow in waves off the wide-open field where a grocery once stood. “I wonder if they’re ever going to do anything with that space,” I pondered to myself. They would give her fluids that day to help her confusion. They didn’t help. She went back the same day for more fluids for more confusion, then to the hospital from where she would come one last time home, to end.

She wouldn’t get better. She would never get the chance to show me up with her slightly better vacuum. The scene would never play out as I’m sure she’d envisioned. I’d come for a party, and she would point out the spotless floors with a superior smirk, and we’d share a laugh about that day I tried to cheer her up with a story about my new vacuum.

Every time I climb those stairs…