Completing The List

4. Help out with the laundry

     She had been putting it off forever, but her friends finally convinced her it was something she needed to do. It had been four months since Hayden had passed, and Lizzy thought it was finally time to go through his stuff. She would pack away the important stuff she wanted to keep and to throw the rest away. Jared and the boys from the firehouse had volunteered to take the ugly green chair off her hands because they wanted to put it in the main TV room and think of Hayden whenever they sat or even looked at it. For years she had been looking for a way to get rid of that ugly hunk of junk, but she couldn't stand to part with it. She refused to let go of it because she liked taking the urn off the mantle and put Hayden in the chair to watch TV or the game. She hoped that still having Hayden in his chair would prevent their team from losing anymore games that year. Turns out the idea worked, as the team went on to with their first championship in twenty years. Lizzy was happy and sad at the same time when she watched the final game of the season with Hayden's urn sitting beside her in the ugly green chair. She wished Hayden had been there to witness and share the moment with her, but he wasn't. Irony at his best, the team he had been watching his whole life won it all the first chance they had after his passing. A cruel joke that wasn't very funny.

     But Lizzy's best friend Anna was right when she said it was time to clean up the house and finally toss out or pack away Hayden's stuff. She refused to however do this alone and told Anna  that she would only clear stuff away if she was there to help out. It was all Anna needed to hear and she was on the next red eye for the city. Annabelle Davis was not only Lizzy's best friend Anna was her maid of honour when she walked down the aisle to marry the man she loved. She kept talking to Lizzy on the phone, badgering her to do a few things to carry on and help her get through the grief and pain that she was going through. So when Lizzy asked her to help out with the cleaning of Hayden's stuff, she was there quicker than you could say 'girl power' and was knocking her door with a fury and eager to help her clean up and aid with the grieving process. When she first got there, Lizzy was happy to see her and had four bottles of her favourite wine in the fridge and they both got smashed talking about the good ole days and when things were easier for them both. A time watching the boys at school when getting the next Bon Jovi album and pimples were their biggest worries in life; simpler days that they couldn't go back to.

     It was the next day when they started to clean up the house and pile Hayden's stuff for packing or tossing. They both moved the coffee table into the bedroom and used the big empty space in the middle of the living room to put all of his stuff and sort through it. She had already decided that there was nothing in his wardrobe that she wanted to keep but she wanted to thoroughly go through all the pockets to someone who bought his stuff from the salvation army wouldn't get something that might be personal to Hayden. Lizzy and Anna were going through his clothes when Anna had enough, "Do we really need to go through every piece of clothing?"

"Yes, we do." Lizzy replied, "I don't want something personal of Hayden's to get into someone else's hands and besides, this is just polite. You always clean out pockets to make sure there is nothing when you're donating stuff out or just doing the laundry."

     "Is that so?" Anna said as she did a half assed search through a pair of Hayden's old cargo pants.

     "That is so." Lizzy said as she picked that same pair of pants up and started to do a more through search of the pockets. As she was looking through the side pockets, she came across a piece of paper and pulled it out of the pocket and waved it in Anna's face. "You see? You don't want this going out there, do you?"

     "Oh my goodness!" Anna said in sarcastic riddled shock. "It's a good thing you found that piece of paper. It would be a crime if some bum out there got his hands on last week's grocery list."