Month: April 2025

When I started my current job four years ago, I sat on the design side of the office between one of the designers and a design assistant. It was while sitting there that I discovered that I am a heavy sigher. From out of nowhere I’d hear Natalie say, “Kathy, are you okay,” and have no idea why she was asking. “You were sighing,” she would say, “I thought something was wrong.”

Last week Michael and I were laying in bed, the windows slightly opened to let the cool evening air in, when I sighed. Michael asked me what was wrong and I said in the dark what is so hard for me to say in the light. “Sometimes,” I said, “I cannot handle the sound of the trains.” I hear the nearby trains multiple times a day. Often they are barely heard background noise and other times an excruciating reminder of Mark’s final moments. There is no rhyme or reason why sometimes they don’t bother me and other times I want to cover my ears and scream the sound of them away. He inched closer, held me, and said, “There isn’t a time I hear them that I don’t think of Mark.”

I love my job 95% of the time. The environment is fun and creative, the work can be challenging, and I am paid well. But it is still a job and those come with obstacles and personality conflicts. A few weeks ago I was told that a person who used to work in our office was being hired back for a few months. I worked with her before, she trained me on some aspects of my job, and I liked her. I was okay with all of it and then was told that I would have to share my work space with her. It caught me off guard and as her start date got closer I kept looking at my space and wondering how two of us were supposed to make this work seeing as how I used all of my desk. I am part-time, though, and two days of the week my desk isn’t used so it seemed logical to everyone but me.

The day came and did not start well. I was trying to assemble an under-desk storage piece that had arrived the day before to hold things that used to be on top of my desk. My immediate boss arrived for the day, put her lunch in the fridge, and came back to our work area and said something about the situation that incensed me. The day was already brewing with emotional landmines as it was the first anniversary of my mom’s death. At 8:30 in the morning a year ago I was on a flight to Chicago. Now I was at work and at my limit for things being taken away from me that I had no say in including half my desk. Things got smoothed over later that morning and in a better version of me I’d say I was accommodating in defeat. But instead I sighed a lot and stored any grace I was capable of in the crappy Amazon storage piece under my desk.

A few days later I had a therapy appointment. Prior to every one I think I should tell her that I am a-okay and she can move on to another widow via suicide. We started our session about my work drama, then to the anniversary of my mom’s death, to the sound of the trains rattling me, and how the past week had knocked me out emotionally. “And then the pope this morning,” I said increduously. “The pope? The only moral compass left in the world up and dies. I mean, how much more are we expected to handle?” “I haven’t been to a Catholic church in years,” my therapist said, “but I loved him. He was such an antidote to what we have been living these last few months.” I felt my throat catch and my eyes tear up. “The thing about grief,” Eileen said, “is that it can start with one little thing and then it takes you down a road where you’re adding another griefy thing and then another until it becomes this big pot of grief stew,” and this is why I will keep seeing her every other Monday until one of us dies.

When Michael and I moved in together I said that I had to be able to do something with the backyard, that I needed a garden. He said the whole backyard could be a garden as far as he was concerned and I knew he meant it. A few weeks ago the bed was cut and last Saturday we went to the nursery where I loaded a cart with plants while he pushed and said encouraging things like, “It looks like you’ve got a plan,” which was extremely generous considering there is a a lot of winging it involved.

I placed the plants in this new garden, moved them, hated it, and wondered why I even thought this was a good idea. Over and over I’d do it again, stand back, sigh, then move them again. A week later half are in the ground and the other half are still being moved around. I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m going to keep the faith that something good is going to shake out of this stew of living things.

The neighborhood I have lived in for more than thirty years consists of a combination of cape cods and small ranches. These homes were built in the 1940s and are under 2000 square feet which includes the basements that regularly get water when it rains a few days in a row. When I once told someone where I lived and raised my family he said, “It’s commendable that you were able to do that in such a small space,” which made me laugh because I never considered it all that difficult. Though Mark and I never considered moving, other families did as their need for a bigger home with bigger closets and dry basements grew. We loved our street and its proximity to everything, the huge trees that lined the sidewalks, and the ability to walk to a shopping center that included a Macy’s, a grocery store, hardware store, restaurants, and for several years a movie theater.

In the past ten years the area has become even more desirable for young families as one builder after another has bulldozed the existing homes for more modern dwellings that currently go for a million dollars. That is an eye popping number for us long-timers who paid less than 10% of that amount. While some of these homes needed to be torn down due to neglect, others have not and I have railed against these changes. I am a lover of quirky old homes and was sold on the house we bought within ten minutes of being in it. A lilac bush in the yard that reminded me of my grandma sealed the deal.

Fast forward a few decades and a tragic loss later, I met Michael and moved four blocks away into exactly one of the homes I have been so critical of for years. Never say never, right? On our street is a combination of new and old homes and one in particular I was in love with. It was one of the original ranches (two bedrooms and under 1000 square feet) that had been updated in many ways. It had a brick front porch where two rocking chairs sat and a beautiful and inviting wood door that I’m sure was custom made. It was the landscaping, though, that made it look like a charming cottage right from the pages of a story book. A stone path led to the backyard and I longed to see what it looked like. Only once did I see who lived there as they were walking in the front door. I wanted to yell, “I love your house!! It’s my favorite,” in hopes a conversation would start and I could see what they did in the back.

A month ago we got a certified letter stating that a home near us was going to be torn down and another built in its place. I immediately got on Zillow to see which one and it was the sweet cottage a few doors down that I loved. No no no not my house, I thought. The following day I went to work and was telling my coworker about it and pulled it up on my computer to show her. It turned out that she knew the owner, that he’d lived there for many years, had remarried, and was a builder. I told her how much I loved his yard, that I would love to dig up some of his plants before they got bulldozed, and she immediately texted him. She never heard back from him as I’m sure he was getting that same request from a lot of people who knew him far better than the nameless stalker down the street.

Last week we got back from a meeting Michael had in North Carolina and then to Florida for a few days to see two of my siblings. When we came home I was stunned to see the house. It had been stripped clean of the front door I loved, the windows, the garage door, and most of the plants in the front yard. It was a shell of what it used to be.

A few days later when Michael and I walked by, I convinced him to trespass with me and look at the backyard. It had a small deck, a shed, and a fountain. A bed of large, tall evergreens were in the corner and another bed bordered the fence line. Despite the upheaval it was as I imagined it – a lovely, peaceful oasis. On Saturday the excavator arrived and was parked in the front yard. Soon there will be a dumpster and what once was will be a giant hole. Someone passing by who wasn’t familiar with the before might think it was one of those rundown homes that had been neglected by a series of owners for years. But that wasn’t the case, that home was loved and nurtured and because of that I am sure that the new one will be equally beautiful and filled with many of the details that made the old one so unique.

These days the outside of my life looks like the lovely, new homes all over my neighborhood and the one I live in now. But for those of us who have grief as our steadfast companion, loss isn’t gauged only by befores and after. There is the in-between state where I was for so long doing brutal, emotional work where everything I knew for sure had been stripped away much like the house down the street. There are parts of that time that will never go away like how a phone call from an unknown number causes me to panic, how every time I tell my kids I have to tell them something I preface it with, “It’s okay, it’s not bad news,” how I have never made the assumption again that everyone I love is okay.

There is a closet downstairs in this house where I have stored my Christmas decorations. When I open it I can still smell my old house with the lilac bush and the memories of the many things it gave and took away over the years. Back then I was living a different dream and had no reason to believe it would end the way it did. But it did and here I am in this new house with this kind man – both of us daring to start something new while never forgetting how costly it was for us to rebuild.