For everything I alter, it feels like I am replacing him. This is not unique, I'm sure, but it is something I am gravely unfamiliar with.
When a grandparent passes, a brand new grandparent doesn't comes along to sleep where they slept or take you on their knee as they did or play the card games they played with you. They get to rest as a piece of your history, secure in the one role they will forever hold, sacred and frozen in time.
This doesn't quite happen when a lover dies when you are 35.
There is something about change after someone passes away that feels like erasure.
I switched sides of the bed so no man would ever sleep where Greg slept. I have yet to move his clothes from the wardrobe or take his coats out of the front closet. The office remains untouched. The last note we typed to each other on the typewriter remains since the last 'I love you.' I haven't changed my relationship status on facebook. It has been almost two years and yet, from the outside, he is still here. Still vibrant and alive. Even his laundry remains in the basket, a daily reminder of how he was going to be back home with me.
And for the most part, I have been at peace with this arrangement. I wasn't in a relationship that required or warranted my alteration of affairs. My heart was at home in the house we built. My life felt less empty with pieces of him scattered around me. I couldn't foresee a reason to change and to be honest, it hurt my heart to believe one day I would have to. Because it would likely be to replace the clothes in the wardrobe... the coats in the closet... the relationship status... the man in my life.
There is something about change after someone passes away that feels like erasure.
But there is something about denying the love of another that feels like emptiness.
And sometimes the change on the outside doesn't matter nearly as much as the change on the inside does.
