February 24, 2020

          The first book I read after Isaac passed was “When Your Soulmate Dies” by Alan D. Wolfelt. The title was jarring and I found the cover of the book extremely difficult to look at but the truths it held inside opened the door to a new way of mourning. The one thing that I was able to take away from it, through the shock that I was now reading this kind of book, was the concept of “heroic mourning.”

          Heroic Mourning is the active, outward, intentional expression of inner grief and since the relationship I had with Isaac was based on an epic love, Wolfelt suggested that my mourning needed to be equally epic. Taking that advice, I thought I’d start with displaying Isaac’s hats in our home, instead of packing them away. 

          Isaac was known for his unique sense of style and he was loyal to his wardrobe. When he found a hat he liked, he would wear it year after year. At one point there was one hat that he loved in particular, and after it was stolen at a public event, he had a hard time even talking about it. They were that close to his heart.  So I gathered them all together from the various places that he hung them in our home and chose the hats that he wore the most, the ones that were stained from his sweat or still smelled of his skin.  After selecting the hats I wanted to honour, I placed them in chronological order and hung them on the back of my bedroom door.

          “There!” I said with excitement and a sense of accomplishment. I had finally created something in our home to honour him, besides the poster boards of photos that were randomly strung up around the house from the aftermath of his celebration of life. I cleared the area of any mess and took a photo for social media. However, proudly posting my progress for everyone to see wasn’t what took the most courage. It was living with what I had just created.

          We stepped back to admire our shrine of sorts. The reality that he was never going to wear them again, that they would never crown the man of our home, wasn’t something we were ready to fully face.  Like the front cover of my first grief book, it was jarring and difficult to look at. Part of me wanted to immediately take them down, yet a part of me needed them to stay up. The moment wasn’t as picture perfect as it was instagramable.

         Due to the location of our display, it was the last thing our daughter and I would see before we went to bed and the first thing when we would open our eyes in the morning.  It quickly became apparent that this wasn’t going to work for us. I was trying to have the courage to heroically mourn but at the same time, I didn’t want to add a daily shock to our system. So we decided to keep the door open, hiding his hats where we couldn’t see them but knowing that they were still there. They remained there for months, secretly tucked behind the open door that I wanted to offer Isaac. A place where not only Isaac’s hats but his spirit could hang out and call our place home.