In October of 2010, five days after Tiffany moved into her apartment, while she was in Stamford Hospital, I unpacked the rest of her belongings that lay around her new apartment and began to make it a place for her to come home to and relax.
It was probably sometime in the late summer of 2010, maybe even September, when Tiffany began to look at one-bedroom apartments for herself. She contacted the woman who had helped her find the apartment she was currently in since the woman had been so helpful in the summer of 2009. The woman came up with a list of places to look at, as well as set up appointments to view the locations. I drove down to Stamford and we spent a weekend looking at apartments. It was exhausting work but fun. I always loved seeing the places and imagining Tiffany living in them, setting up the apartment and putting her little finishing touches on it.
At the same time that it was fun, apartment hunting with Tiffany was draining . She was always second-guessing and doubting herself and I know she was worried about venturing out on her own. We had talked off and on for several weeks about her getting a roommate but it seemed that no matter what I suggested, she didn't like any idea. I recall that she signed up for a roommate website but I don't think she liked the idea of trying to live with a total stranger and I can't say that I blamed her. I really wanted her to stay where she was and I was frustrated that she was letting her roommate drive her out. I suggested that she ask her roommate if she could stay in the apartment after all but Tiffany said that she had someone lined up already and she wasn't going to interfere with that arrangement. Tiffany was a sad, lonely sensitive soul, trying to be respectful of plans already made and not be a burden to others.
We finally narrowed it down to two locations. One was in the center of Stamford and was pretty generic but had some lovely amenities and a fantastic walk-in closet which was one of Tiffany's requirements...for all her clothes, of course. The other was a Yale Lock factory that had been refurbished into apartments that sat on the outskirts of the business district. The apartments were beautiful; 9-foot windows with soaring ceilings that gave you the feeling of sheer white space, original brickwork along the bottom of the windows, a granite-topped island that separated the kitchen from the living room area and shiny, new wooden laminate floors. Not only that, but it was less expensive to boot. The only problem was that bedroom closet...much too small to contain all that Tiffany had accumulated.
That closet was a deal-breaker...so Tiffany was going to go with the apartment in town. However, I think the Yale Lock factory staff knew how much she liked that apartment so they told her they had a one-bedroom apartment coming available right at the time she needed on the 6th floor. This floor had 11-foot windows and was the only floor with walk-in closets in some of the apartments. Tiffany took the place sight unseen. It was worth it because it had an amazingly huge closet and those windows that let in all that light.
So there I was, five days after she had moved in, faced with a daughter in the hospital and an apartment filled with unpacked boxes. She had bedroom furniture but nothing in the living room except a TV and a wireless router. But she had a sectional unit that was going to be delivered any day. Well, I got busy. I would start work and then go to the hospital for the early afternoon visiting hours. I would finish up work for the day, do a little unpacking, go to the hospital for the evening visiting hours, unpack until I was too tired to do anything else and then go to bed.
Meanwhile, at the hospital, Tiffany had time to think and as her interest in getting better grew, she began to direct some of my activities. She described what kind of TV stand she wanted...I think she must have seen it at Target. So off I went to Target (as if going to Target were a chore), armed with a picture that she drew, or that I drew from her description. I wandered around the store, looking through the furniture section, taking pictures of what they had so that I could show them to Tiffany. When I returned to the hospital, she looked at the pictures I had snapped, chose the TV stand she liked (after much deliberation) and then I went back to buy it. I brought it home, putting it together with tools from her pink tool box (yes, truly it was pink) and set up the TV so it was all ready for her when she got home. When it was all prepared, she drew, among all the instructions she gave me that I put in my pocket-size composition notebook, a layout of how she wanted the living room to look, complete with stick figure people. :-)
I gradually put everything away in the best place that I knew. I even had to hang up the clothes she hadn't gotten to, per her instructions, on specific hangers in a specific direction...everything had to be done just so. In between all this activity, I had to drive back home to return the Jeep she had had in college, and that I was driving when I got the call, because the lease was up and it had to go in for repairs. Not only that but I had to go get Riley and Duke; Riley because he was only a puppy, just 3 months old and Duke because Tiffany was going to keep him with her. They were so good on the ride back to Stamford and such a joy to have with me, keeping me company while Tiffany was in the hospital.
It was two weeks before Tiffany left the hospital but I lovingly and willingly made her apartment into a home. And I think before we even got to the car after we walked out of the hospital for the last time, Tiffany was already planning more purchases for her apartment.
Over the next 8 months, Tiffany really made that apartment a lovely place. I wish now that I had taken more pictures of the finished "product". And it's something that one doesn't think of when completely overwhelmed with grief. As we all gathered, shocked, in her apartment after she died, no one thought to document and honor her life there. So unfortunately, before it occurred to us, the dismantling had begun, to our everlasting regret. Now the only thing I have left to pull from is the video Troy and I took of her apartment when we realized the finality of what had happened. One can see brief flashes of the painstaking effort she took to put her singular touch into making this space more than just a place to live but what she did now truly only exists in my memory.
As I stood in her apartment before turning over the keys, I knew there was no way that I could give up what she had so proudly made her home so I brought everything from her apartment back to my house. I used her sectional piece in the living room for a while but eventually it made its way to the family room where it seemed to fit as if it were made to be there. It joined the lamp from her bedroom in this perfect space, lit, not by 11-foot windows, but by 2 brand-new windows that let in the sun shining from the south...
