Choice And Change

I moved again. In this last year I’ve moved my children twice. Once to get away from the place Grant died. The second time to get away from the place Grant lived. Both places are not where I can be free to move forward. So, right now as I write this, I’m sitting in the house I just bought all by myself. Alone, just me.

I’m the only one who looked, decided and bought. It’s the place I decided will be the new place, to start again. Who I was in both of those other places I moved from are not who I am today. I can’t be her. I can’t stay there. I can’t try to keep living a life that doesn’t exist anymore. Who I was the day before Grant died is as dead as he is.

In order for a new person to emerge, the old one has to die. For a new life to be, the old life has to die. This can happen immediately or slowly in time, or never at all. The first option is tougher, the 2nd I prefer, through slow and steady awareness and being proactive. The third, the never at all option is when you refuse to see the slow change or the immediate change. It is the non-acceptance of change as the constant state of truth. It is living in denial.

Sudden change can be a choice too, but usually it is a traumatizing compulsion, forced through a dramatic shift. In my case the death of my husband was also the death of who I was and what I had based my life around. What WE created together. There was all of a sudden no WE anymore. Just me, who had let go of WE.

Your life never remains the same, no matter how tightly you try to cling to it. For me, I accept that I’m not the same, my life is not the same and my future is not the same as I once thought it would be. This point is very important, because as I sit here in the chaos of boxes and construction, wishing that I didn’t’ have to move. I chose this chaos, deliberately chose it. It didn’t happen to me like my husband’s death did.

I could have stayed in the house where I was comfortable, where I had a routine and where everything was familiar. In reality, to find my truth, I couldn’t. It wasn’t real. It was the echo of an old life that is dead and gone. Every day I lived there hurt a little more and more.

I know that a new life, the one I’m creating now, has nothing to do with the echoes of the old one, the one where Grant lived and died. Those echoes are not the memories I want to hold on to. I will keep them sacred, but not let them hold me.

I need to forgive Grant. To forgive him for leaving me in the most permanent way possible, I need to move on. That’s right, you heard me. Forgive him. Forgive him for dying, forgive him for leaving me, forgive him for taking with him the life WE had. The life he stole from me when he decided to go flying on a night when the winds were too strong.

The choice he made that changed mine and our boys’ lives forever. I have to forgive all that to move forward. While I loved the life we had where he lived. While I was cautiously entering a new life that would have been near where he died, neither of those hold any place to where I can move to be whole again and to heal. It’s all new now.

This time I consciously and painfully ripped my own self from what I knew, from my comfort zone. I plopped me and my children into a new chaotic normal that will not be comfortable for months. One day it will be though, when the boxes are unpacked and the construction is done.

Our new place, the one that will be better for us than where we came from will be my true reality. Here, in this new chaos, this new reality and this new place we will find our new normal, our new place, our home.

Not only will I unpack the boxes before me and only take what I can use from them. I will give the rest away, the things emotionally and physically that we don’t need anymore, maybe someone else needs them. I will do that with my heart. Each time I go through a box and create more order from the chaos, I will be doing that in my heart.

When I am done, I’ll see something new and beautiful. I’ll love it. I’ll love my house, my heart and my life and I’ll feel cleansed. Right now I’m cleansing. It hurts, but I’m doing it because I know the beauty that’s hiding. The beauty that’s there and exists even though we can’t see it yet. I can. I just can’t touch it without going through this process.

This is all ok because I know without a doubt it’s there, our happy new life. When the heart is healed and it can then be filled with joy. That’s my real heart. This one I have right now is the one that’s growing that one. That’s why it still hurts.

This house, where I am now, is my new start of something beautiful, emerging into the physical realm as my new heart emerges in the spiritual realm. It will all create the beautiful new physical and spiritual being that is the life I’m stepping into, the new who I am. I hear her calling and every day I answer with, “Yes, I hear you, I’m becoming.”