One more sad story about cleaning people

When my mother's family first came to America, my grandmother cleaned houses to help support the family and get my grandfather's business off the ground. Grandpa Wolf  was a butcher who, over time, turned his meat market into a full-fledged grocery store. And if the German butcher isn't enough of a German stereotype, Grandma Wolf was a fanatical cleaner. (I could dedicate an entire post to Grandma's maniacal cleaning routines.)

My mother often accompanied her mother to her jobs. (The first book my mother owned, Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, was given to her by one of Grandma's customers.) And in watching and helping her mother, my mother learned cleaning from the best.  

So I grew up in a home that was both neat and clean. There was no such thing as an unwashed dish in the sink, piles of newspapers, towels on the floor, toothpaste flecks on the bathroom mirror, unmade beds, etc. As my mother's ace assistants, my sister Kath and I learned how to clean: the right way to clean a toilet, the right way to dustmop, the right way to polish a faucet.

But my mother couldn't come close to Grandma's fanaticism. Compared to Grandma's house - with its plastic-covered furniture and whitewashed cellar - our house was a relative mess, my mother a sloven. Neither, I assure you, was the case. 

My home is, like the one I grew up in, both neat and clean. Thanks in part to my being a relatively neat and clean person, and in larger part to my biweekly cleaning lady. 

For a while, my husband's mother, a young widow with three kids, cleaned offices in Bellows Falls, VT. As my mother had accompanied her mother, Jim sometimes tagged along with Grace. 

Like me, Jim was neat and clean. Like me, he couldn't stand housecleaning. He once said that he'd get a job as a clerk in the 7/11 before giving up our cleaning people. Fortunately, it never came to that. 

When my cleaning people come - they're a husband and wife team that have done our cleaning for years - I usually take off for a walk, so I don't see them in action. 

When I worked fulltime, I only saw the office cleaning people when I worked late. Really late.

And when I'm staying in a hotel, I'm out of the room when the cleaning folks are in doing their thing. Not that there's much of a thing to do. I can't imagine leaving a mess in a hotel room. 

Or in a store or restaurant, or on public transportation, or anywhere in public. 

Of course, even if there's no mess to be had anywhere, cleaning is necessary. Dust happens. Dirt happens. Decay happens. 

Which is why, even if everyone were neat as a pin, we'd still need people to keep things clean. 

My bottom line is that I know that cleaning is hard work, and I have great respect for those who do it. 

But for the most part, cleaning people are largely invisible, behind the scenes. 

Anyway, it may be because I'm the direct descendant of a cleaning lady, I was touched by a recent story about a cleaning lady in South Carolina who died (of natural causes) in a public bathroom in a Belk's Department Store. And whose body wasn't found for four days. (Her family had reported her missing before her remains were discovered.)

Bessie Durham, 63, was a cleaning lady - she worked for a cleaning contractor, not directly for the stores she cleaned - whose work took her to stores throughout Columbiana Centre, a shopping plaza.  

The woman was found in a single-stall bathroom with the door locked, police said, and a cleaning cart was found outside the restroom. (Source: USA Today)

Sounds like Ms. Durham may not have died while in cleaning, but, rather, while taking care of her personal business.

But it's easy to imagine that a 63-year-old Black cleaning lady from South Carolina had lived a hard life, a hard life full of hard work. Easy to imagine that she wasn't in great good health, and was just plum worn out.

How did it happen that her employers didn't notice that she was missing, that she hadn't reported to work? I suppose they just supposed that she was just another low-wage no-show. 

How did it happen that no one at Belk's noticed a cleaning cart outside of a bathroom for four days without trying to figure out why it was there? Cleaning cart? Whatever. Cleaning lady? Out of sight, out of mind. And wasn't there at least the start of the smell of a rotting corpse? Are Belk employees olfactorily challenged? Or was it just a matter of not my job, man, to report something a bit off? 

Not that this incident is anyone's fault. It's not the fault of KBS (the cleaning service), nor the fault of Belk's. 

But even if it's no one's fault, it's still plenty sad that Bessie Durham's body sat there for four days before someone - turns out it was a fellow cleaning person - thought to open the locked bathroom door and see what was inside. 

In life or in death, I guess cleaning people are pretty much invisible, except to their families. Or the occasional nice customer, like the Chicago lady of the house who gave my mother Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates.