Moving is a bitch, no matter how you go about it. Trying to put your life into boxes and then getting them from point A to point B sucks, whether the aftifacts of life have to make a trip of a hundred feet or a hundred miles. I’ve avoided doing so when I could.
But I’ve committed to the move. My electricity will come on Friday at the new place and go out here on Monday. I pick up the keys to the new place after 10 a.m. on Friday and have to turn my current ones in on Monday by 5 p.m.
I was younger and more resilient once. I ain’t no more. I’m not a college student packing up to go home for the summer break. I’m an aging man whose feet and back hurt more than he wants to admit.
Lifting boxes, arranging furniture and sorting through possessions, deciding what comes and what stays is exhausting. Lifting the boxes is the easy part. If it’s in a box, I’ve already decided to keep it. Whatever it might be.
It’s all the other stuff living in limbo that gives me problems. I don’t what to do with it. Part of me wants to keep it for sentimental reasons (as tenuous as those may be), and part of me wants to clean house.
I’ve already given away Shannon’s prayer cabinet and a good part of his Indian brass. That gift to a dear friend felt good. The rest, I’m not so sure. I know that his cabinet and artifacts will be cared for and honored by someone who will appreciate them more than I ever could.
Getting rid of other things, I’m not so sure about. I have 17 grocery bags of books that I was going to take to Half-Priced Books, but I can’t seem to part with them. I have 9 good-size boxes that I’ve packed to move, and I still have books to get in boxes.
I’m getting rid of a rattan sofa and an enormous console for sure. The sofa is ungodly uncomfortable, and the console is too big for the apartment I’m moving to. I keep thinking I might have enough room for all the books once I get rid of those two pieces of furniture.
I’ve run out of room to stack boxes, so I’m going to have to wait until tomorrow after I pick up the keys for the new place to move them and make room for for more boxes to take their place.
And then there’s the endless address-changing. The phone company, the electric company, property insurance, life insurance, health insurance, 401(k) managers, banks, credit card issuers, etc. The list goes on and on and on. I’m sure I’ll forget someone important, but won’t realize until I get a nasty phone call from someone wondering why I haven’t paid a bill I never received.
I’ve done a change of address with the USPS, but I don’t have a lot of faith in their re-routing mail ability. We routinely get things back at work that say “Moved – Left No Forwarding Address” when the address is perfectly legitimate. They often show up 2-4 months after they were mailed, but sometimes as long as a year later. Most go through if I re-send them, so that tells me somebody was on drugs that day.
The hardest thing about moving this time, though, is that this place was the main home Shannon and I shared. We lived for a couple of years in an apartment where neither of us had real breathing room, and when we were able, we moved to a bigger place. In a better neighborhood.
Our old neighborhood was a quiet, unnoticed little gem. It wasn’t fancy, but it was nice. Big trees, quiet streets, good neighbors.
I’d been there for several years before I met Shannon, but shortly after I met him, I began to notice a decline in the neighborhood. It started with reports of burglaries, but then I began to see more and more obvious drug deals taking place on our street. One car pulled up next to another on the street behind an empty commercial building with engines and headlight on, and some sort of exchange took place.
There were other incidents, as well, and I didn’t feel safe and worried about Shannon’s safety. He was already mobility-impaired and probably wouldn’t have been able to defend himself with anything other than a cane. So we had to move.
This is where we moved to. And leaving here will mean that I’m leaving him behind in yet another way.
I know that I’ll never totally leave him or that he will leave me. But it’s just one more concrete piece of evidence that he really is dead. That he won’t be sitting on the sofa in the living room or snoring away with his arms flailed out in the bed when I come home from work.
I’ve read that moving, even a short distance, is as stressful as the death of a loved one. Both involve a lot of the same things: notifying people, taking care of personal business, adapting to a new way of living. They both involve change and new beginnings.
“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” That’s how a song by Seismonic puts it. For a pop/rock song, that’s pretty deep. I am at the end of that beginning and the beginning of this one, regardless of how it plays out.
I have two dead husbands, so I’m not shopping around for another. Cheap sex: maybe. New husband: no. I’m not ready now and don’t know that I’ll ever be. I’m getting to old to be starting over, yet again. I’ve just lost my taste for it.
For now, at least. Those could be famous last words.
I’m getting used to living by myself. It’s 2 months ago today that Shannon died. My life is hectic and chaotic and so stressful that there are days that I want to find a quiet corner somewhere, curl up in a fetal position and cry until it quits hurting.
Normally the work stress or the paying bills stress wouldn’t bother me so much. But he looked after the bills, and I came home to the man I loved. But it's just me now.
I have to now deal with the reality that a similar scenario isn’t likely any time soon. I have to begin again, whether I want to or not. I have no choice, and this move will make that clear in ways I can’t ignore.
It will be tangible evidence of a new beginning, as well an end.
All of the little details will get taken care of. They’re easy enough, even though they will take hours and hours. It’s the ones that will take a lifetime that I worry about.
I don’t want to start over again, but the choice was not mine to make.
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