Navigating My Mother’s Eviction, and My Own

Writing Home by Meg Doyle

I.

I’m carrying my mother’s guitar and her dead boyfriend’s clarinet as we walk down the hallway to storage unit CB09. Much of the morning had been spent deliberating what to take—a Santa Claus mug (leave), her father’s framed portrait from the New York State Supreme Court (keep), a set of camping chairs (leave), an air conditioning unit (keep). We leave behind the ashes of three dogs, but the musical instruments make the cut. 

I’d been receiving the same texts from her landlord for over a year: “No rent paid.” “Ambulance in front of house; mom found unresponsive.” And I’d spent the last two months driving from my apartment in Brooklyn to the east end of Long Island to move her belongings—first, to the back garage that the landlord let her use to temporarily store her things and now to a 5’ x 5’ storage unit (“Closet Plus”) at Westy’s Self Storage on Jericho Turnpike. It was October and the eviction was official. We needed to get together what she wanted to keep of her life and find a place for it. 

We needed to find a place for her, too. 

On the drive from the state-funded physical rehabilitation center where she had been since her last overdose, Mom tells me Westy’s is stunning. “People want to get married there,” she says between drags of her cigarette. “No orange metal doors!” She repeats this unattractive detail of modern storage unit facilities like Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest: “No wire hangers!”

I’d been receiving the same texts from her landlord for over a year: ‘No rent paid.’

We pull up to what could be a Holiday Inn or a penitentiary. A large multi-story building with few windows, overly landscaped bushes and gated access. Westy’s logo is a sketched portrait of a West Highland White Terrier, its head cocked slightly to the right. I stare at the dog’s open mouth, tongue playfully hanging out, as Tim has us sign paperwork for the moving truck and the unit. Tim loves my mom’s Grateful Dead sweatshirt and tells us not to worry about refilling the tank. He’s got it covered. I can’t tell if this is a normal policy or if he’s being kind, but I choose to believe the latter. When in need of a sign of humanity or goodwill, I am capable of believing a lot of things. 

II. 

My husband and I witness a stranger abandon a bag of five-week-old kittens on the sidewalk while walking through a graveyard in Brooklyn. We hold their tiny bodies against ours and walk to the local shelter, but it is May and litter season and there is no room for them. We communicate to each other with a look that has been ours since the start and know they will be coming home with us.

Neither of us are good at saying no, but when our concerned family and friends see photos of the kitten’s faces covered in food and watch videos of them playing on our living room floor, even they agree that they would have kept them. 

We learn things about kittens: how their eyes are blue at birth and change over time. We hold them up to the light and watch the pigmentation of their irises morph. Blue becomes green becomes yellow. We weigh them to make sure they are gaining enough body fat: 70 to 100 grams each week. 

In bed at night, my husband and I discuss the practicalities of what we are taking on. We imagine the five of them at their full adult size, lounging on the couch or stretching on a windowsill. The inevitable stench of the apartment and the bulk purchasing of lint rollers. 

But there is comfort in doing the absurd together. 

III.

When I pull into the driveway of my mother’s house, the dilapidation is staggering: empty boxes line the driveway; the lawn is filled with trash and broken glass; the buckling floorboards of the front porch have corroded. It’s not the first time I’ve seen it like this, but it manages to surprise me every time. The inside of the house is uninhabitable—a historic signature of my mother’s addiction, which spiralled out of control again after the death of her boyfriend. They met in an addiction program, and while they never stayed sober, they were each other’s last remaining companions.  

I had, months prior and after serious reflection (ignoring that Al-Anonic earworm “detach with love”), offered to hire a cleaning company. But when they arrived at the house, the cleaners called to inform me that it was not possible. The state of the place was beyond the level of services they provided. A still life of the moment before another ambulance would take her to yet another ICU. The kitchen counters were littered with the debris of addiction: half-empty pill bottles, a box of Sweet N’ Low resting against molded slices of bread, insects methodically crawling along the lip of a can of Diet Coke. Unopened bags of long-expired prescription medication could be found on nearly every surface of the room. The door to the pantry lay off its hinges, and a dried brown liquid ran down the panels. Exoskeletons of tiny beetles gathered in dusty corners, frozen in their final moments.

In between filling up bags of trash, I sit on the edge of the couch and take long, deep breaths—the kind I have my tenth-grade students do when I’m deescalating a classroom crisis. The task of going through all this stuff is impossible to complete between the two of us and after a few hours of coming to terms with this, we haphazardly comb through the remains.  

We do not mention the amount of drugs in the house. We do not hold up the needles and pill bottles to shout, “KEEP?” or “TRASH?” from the top of the staircase. We just move around them, as if they are not the most important objects in the room, as if they are not the reason we are here doing this in the first place.  

IV.

In September, my husband falls in love with a woman whose name is Peril. “It writes itself,” I tell a friend, knowing that eventually I will write it too. By December, I am moving out of our home of five years. 

Divorce can be a kind of eviction. 

On nights when he is out with Peril, I write and pack boxes. I turn my feelings into paragraphs, give them form, shape, a home. Madness becomes metaphor. Sometimes it floods out of the margins, off of the page entirely. On those nights, I focus on the packing. I pull books off the shelves, remove jackets from their hangers, wrap mugs in honeycomb paper. The candle we bought in Woodstock (keep), the guest book from our wedding (leave). 

It is not the same as moving my mother. Things here are organized, though there is a similar sense of urgency. The house has become uninhabitable in a different way. 

Divorce can be a kind of eviction. 

I come across one of the boxes that I had taken back with me from my mother’s house. It contains Christmas miniatures for a village her father had made for her as a child and that she made for us every year until she lost custody. Some of the figurines date back to the 1940s—the paint having chipped from the hat of a caroller, a missing limb from an ice skater or branch from a tree. The more recent additions to the village feature an LED fire that lights up and a skating rink with magnetized parts that move the skaters in figure eights. I unwrap the Lemax resin houses from their bubble wrap, and notice tiny white pills scattered all over the bottom of the box. I almost mistake them for snow. 

When I grant myself a break from packing, I press my flushed body against the yellow wall my husband and I painted together during quarantine—when home became a harbor for us, a hideout from the pandemic. When we became a team against the spread of an infection that would, it turns out, not be the cause of our marital demise. 

It takes a few months, and somehow no guarantor, but I finally sign a lease for an apartment in a three-family house in Kensington. My students ask how the kittens are doing and I tell them, relieved that they are not inquiring the same from me. Boxes pile up as I remove the familiar objects and place them in their new home. 

I light the candle from Woodstock.  

I break the boxes down, but some are oversized, too unwieldy, and refuse to be held together by twine. I pull them out to the front of the house and try to fold them, but they are stubborn. I let out a loud sigh that is meant to be a scream. 

Secretly, I admire their resistance. 

The front door opens and my elderly landlord runs out. I am a person who always assumes I am in trouble and so for a second, I hold my breath. I notice, though, that she has on her winter coat, her house slippers, and before I can say hello, she is bending over to hold a flap of the cardboard down. Her hands remind me of my grandmother’s—sturdy and storied. She looks up at me and yells, “Get on!” Soon enough, the two of us are standing atop the obstinate boxes, jumping up and down. It is the first time I have laughed in weeks. The double wall of paper fiber gives way. We grab the rope and wrap it around the sides, our hands meeting in the middle to tie it together. A high five signals our success. 

Winded and out of breath, my landlord says, “You can’t do everything alone.” 

V. 

I am on the phone with a social worker at the New York hospital that is trying to discharge my mother on the day that Jordan Neely is killed. Neely, a 30-year-old Michael Jackson impersonator and unhoused man, was strangled by a white United States Marine Corps veteran Daniel Penny on a Manhattan bound F train. 

Mom had been detoxing in the hospital for two weeks but was physically well enough to go home; there was, however, no home for her to return to. I ask the social worker what our options are. He tells me there is a seven-year waitlist for the Section 8 housing in Suffolk County, and a four to five year waitlist for mental health housing in upstate New York. A silence ensues as I wait for more options that do not arrive. 

I ask, “And until then?” 

“She enters the shelter system.” 

There is a lump blooming in my breastbone that I recognize as panic. The first time I noticed it was during tenth grade Earth Science. I spent the earlier years of my education in Catholic School and had not ever considered the formation of celestial bodies, fossils marking the passage of time, the Big Bang Theory—my first existential crisis. Here it was again, that tightness growing somewhere near my sternum, as the social worker compiled a list of available shelters. 

Although the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey shows that the city’s vacancy rate has dropped to 1.4 percent—the lowest it has been since 1968—the affordable housing shortage is still dire. Rapidly increasing rent, the defunding and gutting of social services, continues to put low-income individuals and families at risk. 

Graffiti appears on subway platforms: “Justice for Jordan”. Friends on the internet share statistics of how many vacant apartments and office spaces there are in New York, criticize the housing crisis and criminalization of homelessness under Mayor Adams. The New Yorker publishes a profile piece on Neely, highlighting the fact that he spent most of his childhood in shelters and transitional housing, his own mother brutally murdered when he was only 14-years-old. 

There must be room for us all in this expanding universe. 

I am transferred to a nurse at the hospital who informs me that when my mom woke up, she was confused and agitated. They had given her a sedative, an injection of Haloperidol, to calm her down. She had to be physically restrained. When I see her next, a Milky Way of bruises adorn her wrists.  

Before Neely was killed, witnesses report he had been screaming that he was hungry and thirsty, that he had been asking for a job. Penny was charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, but the state determined that it was justified for Neely to have been physically restrained—a six-minute chokehold that would end his life. 

Textbook images of galaxies and nebulae flash before my eyes and I think: There must be room for us all in this expanding universe.  

VI.

I remember the contradiction of the scene at my mother’s home after the eviction: She kept so much of the life she was trying to leave. I wondered if these objects—a Celtic cross that had been hung up in every place she’d ever lived (there were many), a pair of work heels (she had stopped working years ago as her addiction became less of the functioning kind), even her parent’s bed sheets—were tethering her to this life, were her attempt at staying. Hoarding as survival mechanism. 

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And what was my own survival mechanism? The writing of this, the getting it down? Even as I write and re-write the eviction and the divorce, I delete some scenes: the human details of my heartbreak, the initial hysteria of losing a home you thought was yours forever. I do not say, for example, that one day a few weeks after moving out, I returned to the house and cut up the art my husband hung on the walls that Peril had purchased for him (leave). 

Or I do say it (keep). 

What do we do when we keep losing home? We write ourselves one. 

Home is a cardboard trampoline. It is a storage facility with no orange metal doors. A Christmas village or a subway car performance or a hospital bed. It is the place we make for ourselves when love has failed us.

We break and make it where we can: my mother in the shelter, the street kittens brought inside, and a room of my own on the top floor of a house in Brooklyn where I write about it all. 

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