Home Alone

One year, 8 months and 21 days since Mike passed. Sometimes I wonder what I’ve been doing all that time. Grieving consumed a good share of it. But I’ve been living my life, too. My year-end photo book reflected that — full of pictures of family, my jaunts and general happenings. But the emptiness remains, and sometimes it just grabs me, seemingly out of nowhere. I might be driving down the road and for no particular reason a memory emerges and I break down in tears. Grief continues to do a number on me.

But life goes on. Winter turns to spring, and as it does my thoughts often turn to sprucing up. Changing things around. So I forced myself to take a look at my surroundings — my home, the home Mike and I built over 40 years ago. It is so much a part of “us,” decorated with things about us. We had some of the same design preferences so the home looks like “us.” Does it need to look more like me? I wondered.

There were a couple striking things that needed to be changed. For starters, the lift chair. It served a useful purpose when cancer took such a hold on Mike. I tried it for a while, but it just wasn’t me. And after bumping into the wall too many times as I pushed the buttons, I decided it had to go. It sold quickly on the local buy/sell online store. Now I need a chair that’s more my style.

The other focus was the fireplace, a real wood-burning one. Mike loved to “play with fire.” A cozy fire in the cold winter months was inviting — as long as someone else was tending it. I recently replaced it with an electric fireplace that I can ignite with just a flick of a switch.

Another area of the home was the dining room which we had revamped to be Mike’s office as he eased into retirement. But the large desk was not for me. I’ve replaced it with a writing desk more my size.

These changes are nice improvements for my home, but I didn’t arrive at them easily. As the lift chair was removed and furniture rearranged to fill the space, I couldn’t help but notice the corner of the family room it had occupied. That was always Mike’s space, even when grandchildren invaded it and crawled all over him as he sat in “his chair.” As for the fireplace, I hadn’t used it since Mike passed but at Thanksgiving when I saw my grandson stoking the flames just as Mike had done, I broke down.

Then there are the pictures — of Mike. Right after he passed, my daughters tenderly placed photos of him all over the house. Most of them are still in their locations — in nearly every room. Not so subtle reminders of him. I look at a photo of him now as I sit at my desk writing this blog post. It’s probably time to scale back that quantity and focus more on quality photos that are most important to me.

But I also went to the other extreme. The basement is a seldom used part of our home. It’s where I exercise, sew occasionally and, of course, store things. On a whim, I took a bunch of framed family photos out of storage and hung them all over the basement walls. No sense of order or design plan, but now whenever I go down there I have pleasant reminders of our family times together.

Change is a necessary part of life; that doesn’t mean it’s easy. But with a little extra effort, I can work through it, making things here in my home my own yet preserving the memories that brought me here. So it doesn’t feel like I’m really home alone.