All Chicked Out and Still Full of Love

About a month and a half after Robert died, I left the house we shared and moved closer to my family.

There were practical reasons for it, of course; I had my  girls to raise, a life that had been split open, and a deep need to be near my Mom and Dad. Leaving our house for the last time felt oddly final. It was quiet and a bit strange - the kind of final that settles somewhere in your chest before you have words for it.

When I unpacked in the new place, I did not put everything back out.

That sounds simple, but it did not feel simple at the time. Before Robert died, our home held both of us. His things, my things, our things. The useful life things that belonged to him because he used them, liked them, needed them, or simply had always had them. After he died, I kept photos of him out. I kept some keepsake things where I could see them. I did not pack him away as if he had never existed, but I also did not recreate our old house.

I decorated in a way I liked. I put things where I wanted them. I chose what felt comforting to me and what made the new space feel livable. I did not have to stop and think, “Would Robert care for this?” or “Is this too feminine?” or “Would he roll his eyes at this much softness in one room?”

The first time my sister saw the new place all decorated, she said it was “all chicked out.”

She wasn't wrong - it was definitely all chicked out! The house had clearly been overtaken by girls. There was no masculine balance trying to defend itself from decorative pillows. No practical husband item sitting in a corner, giving the room some sort of utilitarian authority. It was just me, my daughters, and a home that had started looking like the three of us lived there.

And I felt guilty.

I hadn’t done anything wrong - I knew that - at least in theory, but grief does not always wait for logic to weigh in before it starts making accusations from the back row.

It felt selfish to decorate only for myself. It felt strange to realize that I could make choices without considering someone else’s preferences. I could make the house pretty in the way I wanted. I could leave some of his everyday things packed away. I could decide that not every object that had belonged to him needed to become part of a shrine.

That is a complicated thing to admit, because loving someone makes their ordinary things feel important after they are gone. A jacket is no longer just a jacket. A mug is no longer just a mug. A pile of tools, a stack of papers, a favorite chair, a random item that once lived on the dresser, all of it can start to feel like evidence. Evidence that he was here. Evidence that he mattered. Evidence that the life you had together was real.

So when you choose not to display everything, it can feel like you are making a statement you never meant to make.

I was not erasing him, I was trying to live.

There is a difference between keeping memory alive and making your home carry every object grief tries to assign meaning to. Some things are precious. Some things are useful. Some things are both. Some things only mattered because they were part of daily life, and daily life had changed in ways I did not ask for.

That new house was not a rejection of Robert, it was a small act of care for the life that was still in front of me. I had to wake up there. My daughters had to grow there. We had to eat meals, do laundry, lose the scissors, find the scissors, pay bills, cry, laugh, sleep, and figure out what kind of life could exist after the one we had known.

Making the house feel like ours was not betrayal. That is the strange guilt of doing better in the early months. It does not always look like joy or laughter or some big hopeful moment. Sometimes it looks like putting a few keepsakes out and leaving the rest in a box because your heart cannot run a museum and a household at the same time.

Doing better can feel suspicious at first. It can feel like maybe you are supposed to hurt more, display more, keep more, prove more. But grief is not measured by how much of someone’s stuff stays visible. Love is not proven by turning your home into a monument you are afraid to disturb.

I still loved Robert. I still missed him. I still had his photos and memories and the life we had shared. I also had daughters, a new home, and a future I did not want but still had to enter.

Decorating that house the way I wanted was not selfish in the ugly sense. It was one of the first tiny ways I learned that caring for myself was going to matter too. My comfort counted. My taste counted. My need for a space that felt gentle and livable counted.

Even if the whole place was, as my sister accurately reported, all chicked out.

Maybe that was one of the first small mercies of the new house: It gave me a place to miss him without having to arrange every room around his absence.

I could keep the pieces that felt tender and let the everyday things stay packed away. I could make room for memory without making the whole house answer to grief. I could choose softness, color, comfort, and whatever made the next morning feel slightly less impossible.

The house was different because life was different. It held his photos, our daughter’s things, my choices, our survival, and yes, more girl energy than Robert probably would have known what to do with.

That did not make it selfish… it was care. Necessary care, in a house where grief had moved in too.

With Grace for the Mess,

~Stef