Transience in All Things — Death of a Vacuum Cleaner

© 2016 Peter Free

 

12 February 2016

 

 

Impermanence and sadness

 

Even after 7 decades, I am still struck by the sorrow that even trivial losses evoke.

 

 

Yesterday, our German Kärcher vacuum cleaner passed into the Great Beyond

 

Here one instant, cardiac-felled the next.

 

We had bought the used, yellow, bag-bearing upright from the previous tenants of our PCS house. For 19 months, it arthritically served both as a carpet vacuum and a tool-bearing dust sucker.

 

Admittedly, its rug brush had days in which it didn’t work at all and others in which it would only turn for a few seconds. But I didn’t care. The suck-function for carpet cleaning worked fine. Within her limitations, Ms. Kärcher was a trustworthy cleaning partner.

 

 

Ms. Kärcher’s bright yellow plastic solidity lightened the under-stair closet in which she lived

 

Always visible, and ready to serve whenever afternoon sunlight sidelighted the thin film of dust that perpetually obscures these tile floors.

 

I grew used to carrying her tall and excessively heavy weight up and down the stairs, cleaning each with her heavily scratched and battered plastic wand. Her power cord was blessedly longer than most German appliance cords, and I thus avoided having to mess with that nation’s annoyingly clunky-ended extensions.

 

Day in and day out, the “Yellow Beast” sucked up bread crumbs, dust bunnies, bits of drifted paper towel micro-fragments, fallen indoor plant leaves and expired insects in widely varying shapes and sizes — all of which get in via Deutschland’s characteristically screenless windows.

 

 

There had been invasive previous surgeries, of course

 

An esophageal dissection to remove a large chunk of choked cloth.

 

An extended traipse through Ms. Kärcher’s long gut and stomach-bag, looking for gobbled jewelry.

 

A repositioning of her foot wheels to correct a sprain so severe that she couldn’t walk.

 

And so on.

 

 

But then suddenly, yesterday, hemiplegic paralysis

 

I had followed a routinely successful sweep of kitchen and living room with switching the machine off and on again. Only to discover that Ms. Kärcher could now only work in wand fashion. An electrical switch on the carpet cleaning side of things kept cutting power to brush and vacuum motor.

 

A fraction of a second of normal sounding zoom followed by complete silence. Just like that. A heart attack occasioned by one power-on too many. No matter how many times I tried to re-energize her brush heart, afibrillation occurred and she fell silent.

 

 

Grieving

 

Denial.

 

Fighting off neural harassment from a herniated disk in my own decrepit spine, I took the obese Ms. Kärcher completely apart several times. Collecting an impressive scattering of sand and dirt from various crannies with each effort.

 

Wrestled with crotchedy parts alignments and plastic tapping screws. Pondered the silly lack of a properly molded cradle designed to hold her heart-motor properly aligned. Tried various positionings of the motor’s rubber top and bottom dampers, while simultaneously trying to hold Ms. Kärcher’s heavy torso with the other hand.

 

Mildly cursed the stubbornly this-and-that-away power wires, which kept trying to resist putting motor housing and torso-chassis back together. Fumbled repeatedly with the four fastening bolts contained in channels too small for the appropriate torx socket and its extension.

 

Two hours of serial surgeries passed, with no improvement in her non-wand function.

 

 

Until — finally — Ms. Kärcher expired on the surgical table

 

Still occasionally making lots of motor noise, but now not sucking anything at all. Even in wand mode.

 

 

Anger

 

Son of a gun! Now I had to get rid of her comparatively large carcass.

 

Tools of bruteness appeared. A hacksaw and wire cutters, followed by an hour of judicious (and sometimes manical) dissection of everything that had not been surgerized before.

 

Fit, you beast of a friend, into this comparatively small German waste receptacle.

 

 

Sad acceptance

 

Once the burial was complete, I came back to the empty closet. Where once Ms. Kärcher’s light-hearted yellow smile had lightened the dimness, now nothing.

 

Where there had previously been a reliable and only partially handicapped cleaning partner, now only ghosted memory remained. I don’t even have a picture of her to aid fond recollection.

 

 

The moral? — Transience bites

 

Passings hurt, even the small ones.

 

Equanimity helps. But that is not the same as the absence of pain.