TRANSITIONS

Her Life Has Changed

Now the house they shared for thirty years no longer feels like home

My friend’s husband died three months ago after a short illness. To say that his death came as a shock is an understatement. I last saw him in March during a visit back to the States. I still cannot picture returning to California, knocking at their front door and not finding him somewhere in the house. Easier to imagine he’d just popped out for a quick trip to Trader Joe’s.

Kit is coping. Some days are better than others. The house where they brought up their daughter is full of memories. The hallway walls are lined with family photos and framed prints of the cartoons Jerry drew. A writer, he also had a quirky, artistic eye. I can still see the lifesize papier maché giraffe in the corner of the living room. They’d seen it in the irreverent Pasadena DooDah Parade — the ‘twisted sister’ to the staid and conventional Pasadena Rose Parade. After the parade, Jerry bought the giraffe, it’s lived in the same spot for decades.

While Kit said she still can’t bring herself to go into the office where Jerry spent most of his days, other rooms are easier to manage. When we spoke a few days ago, she said she was “tearing through the house getting rid of things,” although nothing of Jerry’s except his golf clubs, which he’d stopped using years earlier.

“I’ve always enjoyed the activity of cleaning and organizing,” she said, “And it seems so right for this point in time.”

She also mentioned a New York Times article I’d sent. I’ve thought a lot about her living alone in a big house and whether she might eventually decide to move. Too soon for such momentous decisions though — as I learned after my second husband died, shortly after his fortieth birthday. Still reeling from shock and grief and against advice from friends and family, I put our house up for sale and bought a condominium. Big mistake.

I understand why I did it, my life felt out of control, the ground shaky beneath my feet. I wanted a refuge where I could lick my wounds and come to terms with what had happened. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work that way. I’d barely spent fifteen minutes looking it over, before I decided to buy the place. Not long enough to realise it offered no privacy, the neighbours were noisy and the Home Owners’ Association was, to put it mildly, excessively militant.

Kit, older and wiser than I was, is doing practical things, but we’ve talked a lot about the NYT article and ways to make the house they’d lived in together feel like her home, rather than a repository of sometimes painful memories.

Carter, in the New York Times article, said:

“I think people underestimate — or, at least, I did before this — how much grief, loss and trauma inhabit your physical space. We don’t think about how our physical surroundings can really be so integral to how we’re feeling.”

Carter opted for a fresh start with a completely “different aesthetic,” than the home she’d shared with her husband. “The main goals were to make it healing, comfortable, cozy and inviting,” she said. At the same time, she wanted to “preserve important mementoes” of the time with her husband. The new decor, which includes framed handwritten notes and objects such as a mounted shadow box with one of his favourite neckties, also serves to evoke happier times.

As she sorts and organises things to keep or discard, Kit said she can already feel how different it is to create a space on her own versus making one as a couple. Something anyone who has lived alone for years before deciding to live a deux will appreciate, although from a different perspective — but that’s another story.

One thing that hasn’t changed for Kit is the garden which has always been her domain. I still remember her reaction years ago to Jerry’s purchase of a large and vibrantly coloured plant that clashed wildly with her carefully chosen planting scheme. She laughed when I reminded her. But perhaps it’s no coincidence that the flower in the small ‘Jerry shrine’ she made is, as I recall, almost the same colour.

In French, there’s an expression, peu en peu — little by little. It applies to so much in life. Loss, adjustment, acceptance . . . making a place your own. Perhaps the secret is not in the big changes, selling up and moving away, but the little things that gradually make a difference, that help to create that feeling of home. I wish that for Kit.

I hope she keeps the giraffe though.