On Moving As A Widow

How strange.

How strange to go through a trauma, pack a life into some boxes, drive and drive, and unpack that same life in a new place.

What are these things?

They were “my” life. “My” life, which was then “our” life and these were “our” things. When I was a “we” and that was nice.

But how quickly everything can change.

Maybe big change hasn’t happened to you. Maybe you think things like this only happen to other people. I used to think that too.

It’s weird though, one day, “other people” are you.

And you’re sitting on the floor of a small, bright living room in a town you never thought you’d live in, with a pile of things around you from a life that no longer exists and a quilt that your grandmother made and that you covered your lover with as he died.

Maybe your lover didn’t even like this quilt. Maybe he told you it was dusty and that it gave him allergies. Maybe he teased you for always putting it over the back of the couch in each and every place you lived in together. And maybe you still brought it to his deathbed, completely forgetting about any of this. And maybe, as you’re unpacking it in this new, little town, you think about how strange and insensitive that act really was, to cover him with this particular quilt, as he died - without even thinking.

But this is what I think about, as my daughter cries silently on my lap after a school drop off that didn’t happen.

Because we’re unpacking a life that was made with him. And we left that life and we came to a new place. And we imagined that life feeling new. And guess what? Everything is different but you know what’s still the same?

He’s
Not.
Here.