Last Memorial Day we went and looked at a couch. The total for the couch we selected would have been close to $8,000. We decided we didn’t need a new couch that bad. As more time passed and the condition of our current couch fully set in I began to look again and what I found was that somewhere between $6,000 to $8,000 is what we would pay for a new couch.
The other thing is I don’t want to finance it. Sure most of the financing is no interest for the first 24 months or something like that but I don’t want to get into any of that. I am pretty sure that is all a crock and what they do is hold the interest for those 24 months and then make you pay it back when you think the loan should be up.
Either way we’re looking for a new couch, and I stopped into the store where most of our furniture has come from. I was greeted by a salesperson and they showed me a few of the couches. They had plenty that fit what I wanted and he mentioned that leather is far easier to clean with kids and if they can tear leather they will tear fabric.
Then I saw it. The couch that is currently sitting upstairs at my parent’s house. The couch that my father sat on and watched TV all day in his last couple years. I had an epiphany. Why would I buy a completely new couch when one is sitting at my parent’s house completely unused. All I have to do is be able to live with the ghost. All the memories of my father floating around in my head.
A lot of the furniture in this house is from my parent’s. It is furniture from the house we lived in when I was in high school and college or the furniture from the beach house we had since 1995. I have so many of my family’s things already. What’s one more piece of furniture?
I think that it is because this was one of the final pieces of furniture he used. It isn’t associated with the good memories of childhood or family vacations, but of poor memories of my father’s last days. A wound that will be a year old come January 18.
Last year at this time we were going through it. We knew the end was near. We had to diagnoses and it’s difficult. At the end of the day I can’t bring myself to purchase a new couch when I have an unused one available to me. We just have to make sure it would fit and then bring it over. The cost of that will likely be between $1,000 and $2,000 but that is better than $6,000 to $8,000, and this type of thinking is what my father would have wanted. Saving money while getting what I want would make him proud. I just have to be able to live with those memories.
David Huzzard Writes 