A Moving Story: Part Two

The move to a new home is mostly complete.  A few things remain in our former home, but for all practical purposes, I’ve relocated to a cozy space just a couple of miles from the home Bruce and I shared. 

Home, as I’ve noted before, is as much a feeling as it is a place.  Of course, this means that the home I had in Bruce is also gone.  And while that is true of a physical space that we shared together, it is true in a much deeper way.  In each other:  in each other’s presence in the world, we were home.

But this weekend’s move was about a physical move.  And here’s the thing,  I can manage/withstand/endure a lot of things in life.  But moving has never been on that list.  Oh, sure, I can plan for a move, and I can pack, and I can schlep boxes, and I can schedule movers.  But there is something about seeing all of my worldly goods moved around by strangers and hauled away that is profoundly unsettling to my spirit.  When we moved from Columbus back to the PNW, I literally hid myself away in the bathroom on moving day while Bruce dealt with the movers.  Hey, there was a place to sit and a water faucet and a door that closed on the chaos!

This time, hiding out wasn’t an option.  My oldest son is here with me, helping with literal heavy lifting, but the management of the four guys who showed up on Friday to load up the house – that was all on me. 

And I did it.  I only went into a room and closed the door behind me one time – to take some deep breaths and re-center myself and text my daughter who is always good for a grounding word. 

But there were big emotions all day long.  This was the house where we first welcomed our grandbabies to Oma and Opa’s house.  This was the house where we began to dream about what it might look like when I retire someday.  This was the house where Bruce hung twinkle lights in every window at the holidays and left them until there was a promise of longer light in the spring.  And… this was the house where he came and sat down in my study, where I was reading, and said on that terrible morning: “I don’t feel right”.

Nothing has felt right since, and the grief around this move is wrapped up in the possibilities that exist in a new physical home.  For me, (and I want to acknowledge that this will feel different for everyone), being in a different physical space has somehow created a bit more emotional space.  And in a whole bunch of ways, I feel Bruce here with me.  I didn’t leave him at the old house any more than I left him at the hospital.  He has returned to stardust and to the richness of the earth.  But I feel him with me, still.  Deeply present and maybe proud of the fact that I managed not to lose my mind when the movers were traipsing all of my worldly goods out and in….on the rainiest day of the year, of course. 

The writer in me is looking for this to all tie together: ideas of home and moving and doing things we thought we couldn’t and grief.  But the thread that knits them together is the grief.  It doesn’t go away, no matter where I live or what I accomplish.  But it changes somehow. 

I’ve started trying to give grief some shape, or to anthropomorphize it, to imagine it as a person.  Because it is a part of me.  It was birthed out of my sorrow and sadness and it is with me in everything and every moment.  So I’ve started talking to it like it’s a person.  To ask it what it is teaching me or telling me.  To say to it “now is not the time”.  Most of the time, I simply greet it with “oh, it’s you again.”

Some of you already know that Bruce showed up on moving day…when the rented U-Haul the movers used pulled up to the house, it was emblazoned with painted stargazer lilies, the

flower he always gave me, on its side, to remind me that my Beloved was gazing from the place of stardust, always here, always with me, cheering me on, just as he always has.