Cleaning Out the Closets

There comes a time in every life when you must clean out the closets, literally and figuratively. Today I did both.

I’m packing my home to move out of state to start a new job and a new chapter in my life. This has come upon me very suddenly, requiring me to make life altering decisions very rapidly over the past couple of weeks. Thankfully, I only just moved into this house 5 months ago, so things are still in relatively good order. This week I’ve been systematically making my way through the house, room-by-room, closet-by-closet, carefully determining yet again which items I will carry with me in my car, which I will store for the future, which I will donate to someone else, and which I will toss for good. Most decisions have been easy: I carried this item to this house but haven’t used it in 5 months—it needs to go to a new home now. Or, this item is too precious to decide more than once: it stays in my life forever.

But let’s be real. I don’t own anything of significant monetary value. I’m a furniture/decorating minimalist and anyone who has met me knows I’m no fashionista; my most valuable household assets consist of a collection of overpriced gluten free flours, a few too many specialized kitchen appliances, far more personal electronic gadgets than one woman needs, and a robust (completely legal and paid-for, thank you very much) music collection. No, my precious items fall more in the “sentimental value” realm than requiring extra insurance coverage. So as I started to pack up my home once again this round, I thought that I had reached the point in life where I knew which items were deemed eternally valuable and therefore didn’t require additional evaluation. While cleaning out the closets I learned I was wrong.

Tucked in the back of my bedroom closet I found them: the collection of stuffed animals that had been a part of Charles’ and my life together. They moved from our old apartment in North Hollywood into my new house in Monrovia, because I wasn’t ready to deal with them yet. They’re big kids—took up a whole moving box of their own—but I’ve had plenty of room in this house all by myself so they never bugged me much. This move is different. I’m relocating to Seattle and leaving my personal belongings in storage in California until I figure out where I’m going to live up there. Space in my car is reserved for (of course) my gluten free flours and a few clothes. Space in my storage unit is costing me by the square foot so it no longer makes sense to keep things around that I’m not ready to deal with yet. Today I had to deal with them.

I sat the stuffed animals on my bed and had a good, long talk with them. Yes, you can just call me crazy right now. I was never a stuffed animal guru until I met Charles, but he had this talent for drawing out the personality of non-human things. Stuffed animals, live animals, cars, and computers all seemed to come alive and gain a voice under his influence. So it was with these old, beat up, smelly stuffed animals now propped up on my bed. We talked about what had happened since Charles’ death two years ago, how they had seen me through the first few lonely months, how they had laughed when I tried to start dating again and didn’t know what I was doing. We talked about how I had been able to leave them to their own devices for a long time, and as a matter of fact hadn’t bugged them at all since I moved into this house. Then we talked about how my life is going in directions now that they just can’t come with me. They will always be a sweet memory of that period with a very funny man, but they don’t belong to my future. We cried together and said goodbye. Although it was sad, it was also very, very refreshing because I knew I had cleaned out another emotional closet.

On the eve of the second anniversary of Charles’ passing, I am struck by the changes which have occurred in my life and my heart in the past two years. This encounter with the stuffed animals was indicative of the emotional upheavals I’ve been experiencing these past two weeks since I made the decision to take this new job and close a 16-year chapter of my life in Los Angeles. Of course this chapter has been all about Charles. He’s the reason I moved here in the first place. What’s interesting, though, is that during the past two years without him, it has become even more important to me to feel like this is my place and my home. I think I had to learn to love this as my own home in order for me to accept that my life is moving on, post-Charles. I always say that life is all about timing, and this seems to be the right time for everything that is happening for me: time to start a new job, time to move to a new home, time to start a new blog about those adventures, time to clean out the closets.

It's Time

They say that a woman’s biological clock ticks away to the point that she knows when it’s time to feel concerned about her parental state. I wouldn’t know. Thankfully I have been relatively sheltered from the pain of that yearning as motherhood hasn’t come to fruition for me.

But the other morning as I drove to physical therapy in Burbank my eyes and heart took a long trip down memory lane and I felt, unequivocally, it’s time. Time to move on.

I’ve lived in this place for 15 years, 3 months, and 18 days. But who’s counting? I’m not anymore, surprisingly.

When I moved to Los Angeles as a newlywed (well, 1 year into marriage), I promised my new husband that I would “give it a good try” and not whine about having to live in California so he could make a go of his career in the film industry. After 5 years here, we looked at each other and asked, “What, precisely, defines a ‘good try’ in this scenario?” Since neither could answer, we lived on for another five and then changed the question to, “Well where else would we go now?” Somehow, slowly, this place became my home. I wasn’t ready to admit that I actually like living in Southern California until about two years ago. And it wasn’t until after Charles’ passing, when it was really no one else’s fault but my own that I lived here still, that I willingly stood up and shouted, “I love living in LA! This is my home! I don’t want to move!”

Despite the fact that I finally love it here and I finally feel like I’m here on my own volition, I know it’s time to go. It’s awful to admit that a Rascal Flatts song precisely sums up the way I feel:

I've lived in this place and I know all the faces
Each one is different but they're always the same
They mean me no harm but it's time that I face it
They'll never allow me to change
But I never dreamed home would end up where I don't belong
I'm movin' on

Don’t get me wrong—this place and its faces have been very good to me. I’ve made friends who have supported me through a great period of learning:

Learning to be married, Learning to have a career, Learning to juggle non-existent money, Learning to accept childlessness, Learning to love others’ children without envy, Learning to be a leader, Learning to grieve, Learning to be single again, Learning to love again.

This great yearning to move on comes from a desire to keep on learning—only I know that I have learned what I came here to learn and that in order to grow in the next phase of my life I need to be somewhere else.

I was afraid to move right after Charles died because I didn’t want any more major life changes all at once. I also was afraid of being accused of running away. I’m not a coward and I’m very stubborn. I have spent the past 17 months slowly weaning myself away, instead. I have appropriately (I think, and that’s all that matters, really) reveled in all the old things that used to bring Charles and me comfort. I have sufficiently cried at memories of places that only he will understand. I have sifted through the habits we developed as a couple and adopted the ones I want to keep for my own (like going to the movies, going to concerts, enjoying good restaurants, and hiking on Christmas).

Besides weaning myself away from the life I built with Charles, somehow I have started to build a life of my own with habits of my own (like urban exploration, hiking on Sundays, cooking gourmet at home, and watching hockey). It has been long enough that I no longer feel like I’m being disloyal to the life I built with Charles as I build a new life that belongs just to Heidi. I’m happy in my home—even though it is full of memories of the man who shared it with me for 14 years. However, I can feel that this home is kicking me out.

While on that drive to physical therapy the other day I drove past the Chase bank branch that used to be a Washington Mutual—where we opened our bank account the week we moved here. It was a little thing to remember, but it will always belong to November 1998.

I also drove past the little post production studio where Charles rolled in and said, “I’m looking for work. I’m available.” A slightly bigger thing to remember, but it will always belong to March 1999.

And so it goes. Everywhere I drive, I have a memory. They aren’t painful; they’re fun, usually. But those memories belong to my past. They’re written down in my journals. They’re recorded in my personal history. They’re summed up in playlists in iTunes. It’s not that they don’t matter. It’s almost like they’re willingly packing themselves up in boxes labeled, “Pull me out when you’re in the mood for a good cry” and shipping themselves to my future…in some other destination.

I don’t know where that future is located; it’s too early to tell. I love it here, I love the life I have here, and I love the people I have here. Wherever my next home is, it’s time.