Less than a month after Mother’s Day, on June 2nd, our landlord delivered the news that we had to move. The place we were renting, a hundred-year-old house without a single straight angle, a second bedroom that barely fit a child’s bed and who knows what lurking in the walls, miraculously sold to a naive bidder after being on the market for 6 years. As the landlord tried to console me with an offer I couldn’t refuse, three months to pack with one rent-free, tears rolled down my face. I was scared but I knew this day was coming. How did I know that it was going to happen? Isaac told me five months after he passed.

           It was the beginning of February. I had just finished Marie Kondoing our house and had downloaded a form to apply for a housing subsidy. I was still trying to put the pieces together of how we were going to pay our rent while keeping the same modest homeschooling lifestyle. As I took the last of the garbage bags out to the curb, for some reason, I said a word to our daughter that I had never said in my life, 

“We’re now moving-ready, babe.” 

 “Moving-ready? What kind of word is that?” I thought to myself. 

          What I meant was that if we were to ever move, everything we currently had in our house would go straight into a box and to the next place. As I sat on the sofa, after a long day of sorting through our sentimental possessions, my phone prompted me to take a look at my photos. As I flipped through, I came across three of Isaac and our daughter that I had totally forgotten that I took. I had spent hours painfully scanning our family photos for his celebration of life, to the point that I was dizzy from the combination of the exhaustion from shock and the torture of reliving our entire lives together frame by frame, and not once saw these photos. Three weeks after Isaac’s celebration of life, I admitted to his best friend that I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that there were not going to be any more photos of Isaac, even after we had both witnessed his cold lifeless body. And here they were.

           Each photo was taken in succession, as Isaac sat across from me at a small child-sized table. His face was lit up with delight and oozing with laughter, as he was trying to not let our daughter know that he knew she was making faces behind his back. It was a look of pure enjoyment and love radiating from his eyes, one that he often had whenever we shared a special moment as parents.

          As I stared at the photos, for a split second, it felt like he was back in our reality. My brain had been doing a good job of blocking my ability to remember Isaac, in order to protect me from the pain, but for a brief moment, I got to look into his face and remember what a pleasure it was to be in his presence. The photos were a nice gift to get me through another day of Isaac being gone and I thought nothing more of it until the next day when I received a Facebook message from an old friend of Isaac’s family.

           “I had a dream about you and Isaac last night. I think you were moving to a new place. Isaac was smiling, laughing, and having a good time. I got mail for the two of you, and inside the envelope, there were pictures of your daughter and her dad together. He was hugging you lots. Hope you feel his love today!” 

~ Excerpt from The Invitation to Exist, Chapter “Being the Answer”