How We Navigate Grief with Blair
I stood in the doorway this weekend and looked at what’s left. Boxes stacked in a concrete room the size of a parking space, behind a roll-up door with a padlock I bought from the storage facility office. Fifteen years of a life together. And I’m not even done. Two more loads at least before I leave for Winnipeg in June. That’s the math nobody warns you about when a marriage ends. Not the lawyer fees. Not the custody calendar. The math of square footage. The brutal, quiet arithmetic of this is what’s left. The lie we tell ourselves about “stuff” I’ve said it out loud maybe forty times in the last month, to friends, to my online followers, to the woman at the storage facility who asked if I needed insurance: it’s just stuff. And I mean it. I do. I’m not the girl who confuses decorative pillows with a marriage. I know the difference between a thing and a life. I’ve read the books. I am doing the work. I can recite the line about how we don’t own our possessions, they own us, and I can say it with a straight face while I’m taping a box labelled CLOSET MISC and trying not to think about the memories made in these outfits. It’s just stuff is true, and it is also a lie, and both of those things can sit in the same sentence without breaking it. It’s just stuff. And also, that’s the shirt we bought on a date, at a show. That’s the cutting board that was given to us by our neighbour. That’s the box of Christmas ornaments we collected, one for each of us, per year, on purpose, like a project. Like we were building something. We were building something. What distillation actually feels like There’s a word for what happens when you reduce something to its essence: distillation. It sounds clean. Scientific. Like you end up with the pure stuff, the truth of the thing, and you throw the rest away. It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like standing in a 5x10 concrete room and realizing that fifteen years of inside jokes, shared playlists, arguments about the thermostat, road trips, holidays, the specific way someone says your name when they love you, none of that fits in a box. None of that got packed. None of that is in here. What’s in here is the residue. The physical artifacts of a life that doesn’t exist anymore. And the cruel part is that the residue is what you have to deal with. The mortgage. The furniture. The padlock. The two more loads are still waiting at the home we built together. The intangible part, the part that actually mattered, just evaporates, and you don’t get to box that up and decide what to do with it later. It’s gone before you’ve finished the inventory. I will rebuild. I know I will. I know this part too. People keep telling me, and they’re right. You rebuild. You get a new home. You buy a new couch. You can start fresh. The boxes get unpacked, or they don’t, and either way, life moves. I believe that. I’m not writing this from despair. I’m writing this from the strange, flat clarity of the afternoon after a load, when the door is locked and there’s nothing left to do today except drive home to a place that isn’t home anymore either. Winnipeg is coming. June is coming. The next chapter is closer than it feels. My single mom, Sharon, always taught me to make sure that I would always be okay on my own. And, so I am and will be. I always land on my feet. A 5x10 storage locker is 50 square feet. Our last place was bigger. The footprint keeps changing. The math keeps changing. Fifteen years, a stack of boxes, fifty square feet, one padlock, and two more loads to go. It’s just stuff. It really is. But I sat in my car in the parking lot for a long time before I drove away, and I want to be honest about that, because I think someone reading this is sitting in their car too. Or about to. Or just got home from doing it. It’s sad. It’s heartbreaking. It’s a reminder of something that will never be what it once was. It’s grief. You’re allowed to grieve the boxes and stuff that is no longer yours. Even while you know better. Even while you’re already rebuilding in your head. Even while there are still two more loads waiting. The stuff isn’t the life. But the stuff is what’s left of the life that I no longer have. And those are two different sentences, and both of them are true. XX Blair P.S. I will be in Winnipeg for the month of June and am open for speaking, workshops, coffee dates and anything else that is fun and soul-nourishing. Please connect. P.P.S. I offer a complimentary call. If you want to see what it’s like to work with me as a Grief and Resilience Coach, book a time here. [https://calendly.com/blairkaplanvenables/bounce-forward-30-minutes] How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. 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