relocating for a LDR

Selling the House


a nice starter home

Image by girl_onthe_les via Flickr

I came home this afternoon to a “For Sale” sign in the yard. I had actually been a bit worried about my reaction. This was the house that Will and I wanted to make a home out of. Have another baby in. Live the future we had planned. None of those things ever came to pass. It is still just a house. There is no baby and never will be. Ironically we’d never had even the slightest chance at a future from the day we first met because he was already dying.

 

There was a message waiting on the machine already from the realtor who had found the buyer for our last house asking could he bring clients by later and could I call him to confirm. I decided to take that as a good omen.

 

I would love for this house to be sold in a matter of weeks. It has held me prisoner long enough. It was meant to be someone else’s home and future, I think, and I have just been “keeping it warm” for them. But I am realistic enough to know that finding a buyer in the current market could take a while and, regardless, we are leaving for our new home in Canada with Rob mid-June.

 

All this packing and realtor stuff has brought back memories of selling the last house and all that was going on at the time. The house we were living in was mine. I had bought it the summer before I met Will. I loved that house. I loved the area which was the original part of the suburb we live in. The neighborhood had been flooded out in 1993 and the house on my lot torn down and replaced with the tiny starter home I ended up buying. It was just a couple of blocks from the old shopping district. I could walk to the farmer’s market on Thursday evenings and over to the post office. There was a walking path not too far off that I did my daily running on. I had an old-fashioned front porch where I would sit on the steps and listen to the trees whisper to the skies on windy evenings in the summer.

 

When Will moved in, we put in a brick patio in the back and grilled out with friends on the weekends. Actually, we grilled all the time as soon as the weather was warm. He loved to grill. The epitome of the male stereo-type if you want to know.

 

We decided to sell and find a bigger place when our daughter was about 9 months old. Will was already quite sick but we were still choosing to believe the doctors who told him that it was stress and depression. I am not sure I ever really believed that but I know that by the time we had begun the process to sell the house, I didn’t believe it at all.

 

The house sold the weekend of July 4th. It had only taken about 4 weeks. By the end of that week, he had been placed on leave because of two accidents he had with his cube van. Ultimately they would fire him, but at the time I was so angry with him for keeping his troubles at work from me. I still sometimes wonder what he was thinking then but I doubt he had any clear comprehension of what was happening by that point as he was just weeks away from the point of no return physically and mentally.

 

The day we moved I had to forge his signature on some of the documents because he couldn’t really write anymore. It was obvious to anyone who talked with him, looked at him even, that he was very ill. Moving day was a blur of people and an overwhelming desire to throw my baby into my car and drive as fast and as far away as I could get.

 

I had loved this house the first time I had gone through but from the moment we were moved in all I wanted was to leave. I didn’t hang pictures on the wall. I stacked unopened totes and boxes in the basement that are still sitting there today. I just knew somehow that this was not permanent.

 

Selling feels right though I can’t deny that it is stirring up memories of times past. Feelings of being overwhelmed, helpless, lost, cheated, trapped. Not good times. But, they are just memories.

Tired


why I dance

Image by bluedance via Flickr

I have actually been working on a new entry on and off all day. It’s about soul mates. Something I don’t really believe in, which I think is almost heretical for a widowed person to say. But when have I ever followed the widow herd? Okay, maybe there were times when I did,  but certainly not meekly.

 

It is nearly done, the soul mates entry, but I am too tired to finish and post it tonight. The weekend was long. Getting my house ready for sale has been emotionally draining. Dee has been whiny for several days and finally had a little meltdown this evening. She is ready to start moving forward too it seems as she cried for her “daddy” Rob and her “big sister” Mick at the same time.

 

On the board today I have made several attempts to stem the tide of negativity about dating in general and men in particular. But it did no good. There is no choir there to back me up. When you learn to sing well enough, you leave.

 

Why don’t I?

 

I guess I feel I still have things to say, though it is mostly just trying to be a positive example of what can be for those who aren’t far into the journey. I remember when I first started posting. I looked purposely for anyone who had something hopeful to say. I am not a freak in that respect.

 

The house lists officially tomorrow. Another step in a forward direction.

 

Cleaning for a Move


Packing For The Move

Image by Looking&Learning via Flickr

I have spent the day cleaning and packing. The house goes on the market this week and in realtor talk is in need of “de-cluttering”. Not there is much in my house anyway. We had only just moved in when my late husband was diagnosed with his illness and honestly, I only unpacked what I needed. The rest sat boxed up in the basement or forgotten in closets. We didn’t have much furniture because our previous home had been very small. We’d planned to update and refurnish but neither were ever accomplished. So the house is furniture light and toy infested for the most part.

 

Since last spring I have been purging in spurts. Preparing myself  for something is how a friend put it. “You’re getting ready for a move,” she told me. “I’ll bet within a year you will be somewhere else.” At the time I was still in that numbness that claimed me during the first six months, but I did have sense that something was coming. It drove me to find some way to move forward with me life as it simultaneously drove me crazy.

 

As I work my way through rooms and closets, I am discovering things I hadn’t known I had forgotten about, and it gets easier to find these memories and appreciate them without letting them throw me into a tailspin of sorrow. I don’t know if it is the same for Rob. He is still going through his “firsts” and I am into “seconds”. Odd notion, seconds of something you never wanted in the first place.

 

Another widow in my WET group, who is also selling her home, remarked to me at out meeting last night that she have wished she could just rent one of those large dumpsters and just empty the contents of her house into it. So many things have memories attached to them, but basically it comes down to just have too much stuff. I told her that in my next life I was just not going to buy things. Perfect the art of minimalism. I have fantasies of being able to fit everything I own in the back of one of those little UHaul trailers. Just a fantasy though.

 

The purging of material goods is upsetting my daughter more than it is me. Earlier in the week my oldest niece stopped by to pick up some of the baby items I still have and take them to an old high school friend of hers who recently had a baby. The girl needs pretty much everything by way of supplies, and I am happiest giving my possessions away these days, especially to those who are in more need than myself, because I don’t consider myself needy anymore.

 

After dealing with a teary, whiny child both last night and this morning, I come to find out from her that she thought I should have kept the baby things because “babies need a lot of things and can’t share my things”.  She still harbors the belief that Rob and I will give her the younger sibling she longs for quite desperately. Even after a long talk as we drove to the dress shop to try on her flower girl outfit, she refuses to believe that I am very serious when I say there will be no baby brother. Despite her bravado and her real desire to move to Canada and start a new life, she is just a little, little girl who thinks her daddy will not be able to find us if we move and that a baby would still be better than the big sisters she is getting.

 

Whereas my daughter mourns the items lost to our move, I would gladly dump nearly all we own at the local Goodwill. Clothes, dishes, kitchenware, furniture, everything. It is all part of the past. The past with Will. The past when the future was bright. The past of waiting while he died. The past year of grieving. I don’t live in any of those realities anymore.

 

Whenever I speak with someone about Rob, the wedding or going to live in Canada, the conversations reference words like “fairy tale” and “dream”. People will tell me that they are so happy for me because I deserve to have some happiness after all I have been through. I don’t see my life now as dream like or Disneyesque, and I know of people who suffered far more than I ever did and are not contemplating nearly as wonderful a future. I am not really much different than anyone else. We all have opportunities come up over the course of our lives and some are seized and others let by. The opportunity for love came along in Rob and for him in me and we were optimistic enough, and smart enough, to recognize it and accept.

 

And so now I am cleaning for a move.