Making A New Bedroom

On the weekends, I like to try and organize myself.

Sometimes I succeed in my de-clutter efforts and sometimes I don't.  During the work week, I have a very bad habit of throwing clothes and papers into piles.  By the time the weekend rolls around, I know I have to deal with the piles and hang stuff up and throw things away.

 

This past weekend marked a milestone for me because I just had my bedroom painted and most of the stuff that was under my bed,  hanging on wall and door hooks and on top of my furniture was in another room.

Just typing that sentence is a big deal.  It's my bedroom; not our bedroom.  I am taking a big leap by changing the room and making it look different than it did when my husband was alive.  Not that the room looked all that great when my husband was alive but it was ours and it was comfortable.

 

This was my opportunity to practice what I am always writing about: to embrace your life and move forward.

I was going to paint the room myself last summer but something always seemed to happen and I never got around to it.  Other rooms in the house have changed since my husband's death but this one has remained essentially the same.  I enter the room but I never really look at it or spend any time in it.  I usually go to my bedroom when it's time to sleep or change my clothes but I don't go there to hang out and say, read a book, or talk on the phone because there are too many memories there.

 

Now, nine years later, after all this time, I finally realized I had to make it a different room.  Otherwise, it would always be "our" room and that would be rather silly since my husband died.  I didn't even put any of my clothes in the drawers on the other side of the bureau because those once belonged to him.  It didn't feel right putting my things in his drawers.  But last year, I slowly started taking over all the drawers (it felt weird at first) and I must admit I am thankful for the extra space.

It was a gradual decision to change the room.  Over the past year, I found it was getting be a real downer to be in the room because here I was trying hard to rebuild my life and move forward yet when I came into my bedroom it was stuck in time.  I had flashbacks to our time together and I loved the memories, yet I knew that I would still have the memories even if I painted the room, bought a new bedspread and pillows and moved the furniture around.

Of course, this didn't come to me all at once.  It took awhile for me to push myself to do this.

Even though it was hard to do, I am now glad, and actually sort of relieved, that I am changing my bedroom because now it feels fresh and renewed.  It's okay to give yourself as much time as you need to feel comfortable with whatever changes you make in your life after you lose a loved one.  You know how it feels and you know when you are ready to think about your life in a different way.

It's not sad to change.   It just means that I am taking what has happened to me and learning how to blend it into my present life in a positive way.  I'm not leaving my husband behind because that's not possible. 

But I've come to the point where I realize it's okay to make new memories for myself.
 

Not On A Pedestal

 

 

 

 

I wrote a post in June about my "paper chase" through boxes of memos, computer printouts, handwritten notes and personal writings that belonged to my husband who died eight years ago.  As I previously mentioned, after all these years, there are still lots of boxes sitting around waiting for my attention and this past weekend I found the time to go through another box.

 

You can choose to go through all of a loved one's papers yourself or you can do what a friend of mind did when his wife died: he paid someone to come to his house, box up his wife's belongings and take them out of the house to donate to others in need.  It was just too painful for my friend and he chose to make a clean break of it by having someone else move everything out.

 

I could follow my friend's example but I am too afraid I will miss something valuable.  Not necessarily something that's worth a lot of money, but something that's worth a lot to my heart.

 

I'm not sure what value I would put on this particular box.  At first it seemed worthless, full of things I could easily throw away, and then I came upon a very old interoffice work email that my husband had printed out.  My husband was a very busy man who wrote about serious issues and serious stories of the day. He had a great sense of humor, yet after reading a large amount of his work emails, it amazes me the ridiculous stuff he and some of his male colleagues would email each other about.  

 

With a subject line of "The 5 Toughest Questions Women Ask," this particular work email talked about an article in something called Sassy magazine; which I'm not even sure ever existed.  The email said that the five toughest questions women ask men are the following:

--Do you love me?
--What are you thinking?
--Do I look fat?
--Do you think she is prettier than me?
--What would you do if I died?

Basically, the email was silly and had an old boy piggy tone to it.  The questions and their accompanying answers continued with the theme that some women should be seen and not heard.  I'm sure in his own way my husband thought this was funny or maybe he thought the person who sent it to him was funny but the humor of it escaped me.  If he were alive, my husband probably would have handed to me and asked me what I thought of it.  I'm sure I would have rolled my eyes and said, "Not much."

 

This little exercise reminded me not to make my husband out to be a saint.  Not that I had made him out to be a saint, but sometimes with the passage of  time you forget the nuances and some of the things a person used to do.  This exercise also is making me see my stuff in a new light.

Just as we all do, my husband said and did things that were sometimes annoying and sometimes politically incorrect but I loved him anyway.  I think this is one of the reasons why only people who were emotionally close to the deceased person should go through their belongings.  They knew the whole person and really and truly understand the context of what the loved one left behind.
 

My Paper Chase

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I've started going through a number of boxes of papers that once belonged to my husband. 

For those of you who have gone through the belongings of a spouse, friend or relative after they died, you know this is not a straightforward process.  Each of these boxes is potentially an emotional minefield because I don't know what's contained in them.  He filled them up and now they are waiting for my attention. 

You might be thinking, "It's just old papers.  What's the big deal?"  Since my husband was a reporter/writer/editor, these papers aren't the same kind of papers you might let pile up on your dining room table and then throw into a box.   I need to read the papers before I decide to throw them away.  These papers could be old stories he wrote or memos he wrote or ideas he jotted down on the fly.  

I'm sure it sounds rather lazy of me that I have let these boxes hang around for eight years and I have yet to go through them.  In a perfect world, I would have already sifted through all of the papers, tossed the ones that don't mean anything and read the ones that mean something and either filed them away or given them to a family member.

But, this being an entirely imperfect world, some of the boxes have been in a closet and some have been under a table in my home office.  I have attempted to go through them many times before but I would always come upon something frustrating g and then had to stop.  Sometimes I would open the boxes up just to remind myself what kind of stuff was inside.  If the papers on top were computer printout of stories from websites or printouts or newspapers from years ago, then I made a lot of progress and started throwing things away.

The hangups usually start when I find bev naps (short for beverage napkins in restaurant speak) with his hand writing on them and I start to read them or just stare at his handwriting or try to figure out why he wrote what he wrote.  Or I find a work email he printed out that is a record of a particularly funny incident or a particularly annoying disagreement he was having with a colleague.

Some of these papers are priceless and some of them are oh-so-painful.

I can hear his voice in my head as I read some of the notes and I have responded to him by saying, "Why did you leave all of this here for me to clean up?  I really don't know what to do with it.  I wish you had thrown it away when you had the chance."

And then, just as I am exasperated by the whole tedious process of it, I'll discover a real nugget of information that I have never seen before and can't wait to share with his children: a yellowed and wrinkled page from the December 8, 1967 Congressional Record showing that one of his stories was inserted by a senator.

I didn't see that one coming at all!

Letting Go

Longer, warmer days are making me yearn for a simpler life.

Lighter clothes and lighter food are definitely the way to go.  There's something about the change in season that makes you want to lighten your material load here on earth and get about de-cluttering your nest.  This past weekend I was cleaning the house and I started pulling stuff out of my closet and making piles of "keep," "donate" or "give away."   

Getting  rid of things you never use or wear feels so great!  But de-cluttering isn't just about your material things.  You can de-clutter your thoughts or your attitude.  What a concept!  Here's a story I found on mariashriver.com that got me going into throw away mode and I thought you might like it too:

April 16, 2012
www.mariashriver.com
Tips for Transformation

An Easy Way to Achieve Peace of Mind

By Barry Dennis

Whether I'm working with a Hollywood celebrity, consulting with a spiritual leader, or speaking to congregants at Celebration Church in Portland, Oregon, I always encounter the same question: How does one achieve peace of mind?

I believe I am getting closer to the answer, and it begins with getting rid of excess "stuff" in one's life -- whether it's material things, unfulfilling activities and people, or useless information.

If you try to only fill your life with things, people, and activities that feed your spirit, there will be a lot less junk standing between you and peace of mind. Now I travel the country motivating and inspiring people to do this.

My own journey toward peace of mind began on April 3, 1998, at 3 am. It was possibly the best day of my life. My wife performed the miraculous that day: the act of giving birth. I made a solemn promise to that 8.3-pound boy the first time I laid eyes on him. I would never parent out of anger.
And, I must say, I have done well living up to my promise. Except on one day, possibly the worst day of my life, six years later.

The first thing I remember that morning is all the shampoos. Why so many bottles? What should I use? Maybe I could use a shower gel for my hair and body! Radical. And then came the hair gels, lotions, and toothbrushes (Which one is mine?).

Upon opening my closet door, I was overcome with a full-blown episode of “apparel-yzation,” which is the act of staring, immobile, into one's bulging closet shackled by the thought “What to wear?” Which is sometimes followed by the nutty notion, “I have nothing to wear.”

The encounters with chaos continued. There were pieces of mail and other random papers on the kitchen table and counters, enough cereal boxes to open my own Kellogg's outlet store, and my boys playing with the latest version of Xbox something or other while the outdated versions lay in heaps, half in, half out of drawers.

I tried to simultaneously pick up after them and get them ready for school.

It all came to a head when I opened the door to my son's room to see before me what looked like a testing ground for nuclear weapons. I was late for an appointment, and my son had already missed the bus. He was supposed to be in his room getting ready. “CJ, where are you?” There was no reply. This time I yelled, “CJ, WHERE ARE YOU?”

A squeak came from behind his closet door, “I’m in here, Daddy.” I opened the door to find him in a sitting fetal position, overwhelmed, surrounded by refuse from the ghost of Christmas past. He explained, “I’ve been looking everywhere, but I can't find my pants.” A tear rolled down his cheek.
But I couldn’t see it. I was blind, turning green like the Incredible Hulk as I yelled, “GET UP NOW, RIGHT NOW! I'M LATE BECAUSE YOU CAN'T FIND PANTS? GIVE ME A BREAK! THIS IS RIDICULOUS.”

We drove to his school in total silence. That had never happened before. The rest of the day I felt like a lowly worm at the bottom of a compost heap. What had happened? That was not me.

A few weeks later I shared my frustration with a good friend, Dr. Harold Bloomfield. I told him about all the stuff, from the shampoos to the floor of my son's room, and how it all seemed to pile up in my mind, creating an overload that turned me into a rageaholic monster. “What is it?” I said.
His reply changed my life. “Oh” he uttered, shaking his head, “you're talking about Chotchky.”

It’s an old Yiddish term. I’ve come to understand it as anything we have in excess that intrudes, clutters, or distracts us from our soul's highest purpose. Chotchky isn't just clutter. It can also be unsupportive people, too much technology, unhealthy food, unwanted gifts, and regrettable decisions, among them. But the junk in your house is the easiest kind of Chotchky to identify.

What my son and I were experiencing was the “Chotchky Effect.” Too much Chotchky can leave us stressed out, irritable, and confused. No one wants to be on the receiving end of the Chotchky Effect.
You see, I wasn't angry at my son. In fact, we are almost never angry for the reasons we think we are. There is usually something behind the anger. Often, if we’re willing to look close enough, we will recognize that “something” as some form of Chotchky.

The anger directed at my son started with an excess of shampoos and built from there. Besides, who bought him the Xbox’s, the toys, and all those clothes that overwhelmed him and me? Hmmm.

Think of your conscious mind as a sacred shelf. It can only hold so much before it starts to bend.

Everything we surround ourselves with, that we come into contact with, is placed on our sacred shelf.
One shampoo is enough. The other nine in the shower that day were Chotchky and they took up space on my sacred shelf. By the time I got to my son's room, the weight of the Chotchky Effect was taking its toll. My sacred shelf snapped.

Give yourself and the ones you love a blessed gift. Eliminate all the Chotchky in your life, one room at a time, and donate it, recycle it, or throw it away.

Doing so will lighten your load, unburden your soul, and give you peace of mind.

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Barry Dennis is an internationally known inspirational speaker and spiritual teacher. His new book is The Chotchky Clallenge: Clear the Clutter from Your Home, Heart, and Mind…and Discover the True Treasure of Your Soul (Hay House, April 2012). Learn more at www.BarryADennis.com.