I Sold Grant’s Happy Place

I sold the house that Grant bought 7 months before he died. The one he had to have so he could go flying. The house that got him out of the snow. The house he moved into with the hellish heat. The heat that I felt at his outside celebration of life funeral in July in that heat. The funeral he missed because he was dead.

I hung on to it thinking I could hang on to him. He loved it. That house made him excited. It was rare to see real emotion from him. He was so down to business most of the time. It always excited me when I could see he was actually feeling something. I especially loved his excited happiness. That house gave him that excited happiness. Flying gave him that excited happiness.

 I can’t blame him for his love of flying. I even supported him in it. FULLY. Never once did I worry about him being up in the air. Never once did I feel he’d be in danger. Only once did I feel like I didn’t want him to go. That was the day he left and never came back.

Even that night when he still wasn’t home, it was the only night that, inside my body, I had a feeling of longing for him not to go. I hadn’t said, “Don’t go,” because I didn’t want to hold him back based on what I wanted.

That house is where he prepared for his flight, where he left like he had so many times before and come back, where he left me alone, where he left that day and never came home. I thought if I held onto that house, somehow I could hold onto him and the life we almost had together.

That house represented the culmination of all the hard work we’d done and where we finally had the time to be with our little family, to let go of the day to day and to create our dream life. We could be with the kids, each other and had real freedom. Is it any wonder that I wanted to hold onto that?

They say don’t make big decisions in the first year after losing a loved one. Well, when it’s your husband and you have 4 small kids and a lot of stuff to manage, you have to make big decisions. It was inevitable. I moved my kids back to the home we’d all lived in only 7 months earlier and had lived in for 8 years.

The only home they’d known until we bought this new house in a place that was Grant’s new happy place. It was supposed to be our new paradise. We went back to the previous house where I had some semblance of order, but it wasn’t ideal, nor was it paradise.

Our business is running out of the house I moved us back into. We have the team coming in and out and filming and needing their space to carry on the legacy Grant left. I have 4 boys who all want to be just like their dad and in his space and in his stuff.

The conflict of space wouldn’t work for long but I had to recover. I had to get my bearings. I had to find my own way. That meant leaving the house that took Grant from us and moving back to the house where he built our life.

I had a hard time deciding what to do. I just couldn’t let go of the house that represented everything he wanted. It somehow felt at first, that if I could hold onto the house, I could hold onto the dream that was killed along with my husband, but it wasn’t so.

The first time I went back, it had been 2 months. The house had been left vacant. His clothes still hung in the closet. The house looked like it had been abandoned. There was mouse poop all over.

When I was there, I felt completely overwhelmed and incredibly sad. I walked through the hallways and rooms and just remembered that last day he was alive. It was all here in this house.

On that last day, he darted around the house and garage working on all sorts of projects; in and out, upstairs and down, all with that quality of life. He was so alive that day. Now I went out to the garage where he had been working on his paragliding equipment and there his truck sat parked in the garage, stone cold still.

When I and the kids pulled into the garage this first time back, the baby squealed, “daddy’s truck!” is daddy home? He remembers the house. He remembers it’s “daddy’s house.” He was ready to see daddy again.

That made me feel so mad. This was probably the first time the anger was planted, and before it began to settle. This house was ‘daddy’s house.’ He bought it for himself so he could fly, so he could get himself killed.

This house represented his death. This house was the house where the doorbell rang at 3 am with 4 strange men standing on my porch in the dark with the news that would forever change the course of my life. On a day that became a hinge point for me. The death of our life together, and birth of my new life.

What I had had and what was now reality could never survive together. Nope. It was all gone. I was now left; not even to pick up the pieces, there weren’t any pieces to pick up. I had to now go find something new. That was it.

I didn’t even know it yet. It’s why I desperately grasped to pick up what I thought were the pieces, but that just hurt. Every time I came to the house, it hurt. I kept coming back though, bringing the boys and letting them play with their friends and remember. Remember the house, remember the daddy they had there, remember the life we had for just a few short months together before it was all gone.

It was more than I could do. It wasn’t a place I could stay. I just wasn’t willing to admit that until I realized Grant was holding on as much as I was. I’d come back to the house and feel his presence. It was like he was there waiting for us, annoyed we’d been gone for so long. Wondering where his family had been.

I could feel irritation from him, like HE’D been the one abandoned! It was time. I couldn’t live in this. He was dead and whether he knew that or not, he had to move on as much as I did.  I put it up for sale.

It was so hard to do that. It took me weeks, and even then, a part of me hoped it wouldn’t sell. People came to look and I got an offer after not long. It was a good offer. I took it. I then hoped it would fall through-and prayed it wouldn’t.

I cleaned it, packed it and cleaned it again. I went back one more time by myself. I yelled and screamed and cried to Grant this time in that house. After I screamed and cried and fell apart, I said goodbye to every room and what I remembered of Grant in each one.

These steps I was taking would bring happiness back; not the steps from before that held onto this sorrow, not the memory of that front door, not those men who walked through it with the news my children no longer had a father.

I was done. Done with that, with him, and done with wishing that the life we had planned could somehow happen. It wouldn’t, so I was letting go of the physical house that represented that dream.  

I started to breathe again, then I sang. The empty house reverberated the melody of my voice and it was beautiful. I prayed to release myself and the house and the spirit I felt of what was the memory of Grant’s time here. I prayed that the house would be healed, that I would be healed, that Grant would be healed and that the next family that lived here would find joy.

I pulled out of the driveway to leave it all behind for that last time. I said goodbye, not just to the house. It was to him. It was to close that chapter in my life, so I could move on and be ready for the next part of my life.

Today I signed the papers and now it belongs to someone else. As I did, I felt a huge relief and that familiar feeling of my heart; heavy with the weight of letting go of something I didn’t want to let go. I knew that once I did, my heart would find a little more peace.

I sold the house. I sold the dreams it carried with it.

Now I can start my new dreams, I just have to find them.