February 5th, 2020 

          By the time I accomplished what I set out to do in the Facebook post below, I was a mess of emotions and wondered what the hell I just put myself through. Like the viral video of the toddler who was saying she was laughing, but she was actually crying, I was emotionally exhausted from asking myself if every object from the life we had lived together “sparked joy.” 

          At the time I wrote the post, I was vacationing high in the mountains of Arizona and had decided to start my new bullet journal with Marie Kondoing our home when we returned. While the words that wanted to be written in a post started to percolate in my head, I was silent. Apparently it wasn’t normal for me to be quiet for more than a minute, forcing my sister to ask, “Jen, are you ok?”. I replied, “Yeah, I’m just writing something in my head.” She took my response as something normal, but for me, it wasn’t. I had never thought or said those words before. That was the start of a year of words spoken in my mind, that eventually screamed for me to let them out. 

          My game plan that January was to tidy up every single inch of our home before I touched anything that belonged to Isaac. As suggested, I started with our clothes, then books and finally our papers. Then I moved on to do our bedrooms, first our daughter’s, then ours. Everything was going smooth until I hit Isaac’s favourite place, the kitchen.

          Isaac was not only a highly respected and loved chef at his work, but he was the chef of our home. He spent most of his time dreaming up and creating new dishes for us to try before he served them up for the public. And yet I was totally blind sighted by the fact that a small plastic kitchen utensil, an item from the dollar store, could bring forth an episode of ugly crying. I thought I was safe as long as I didn’t try to make a decision about his things, but didn’t realize that as I held each object that he had held, I would see our life flash before my eyes, sparking tears with things that had once brought joy.

          As I finished tidying up every corner of our home, besides his, and started to remove the pile of garbage bags that had accumulated in the living room, I turned to our daughter and said another sentence I had never thought or said before, “I think we’re moving ready.” I instantly wondered where that term came from… “moving ready”? What I meant was that if we needed to move, I would just pack everything that was currently in our home, the things that sparked joy and tears, in a box and leave. There would be no deciding what would stay and what would go. Everything that was within our four walls was what I wanted to keep as we moved forward in life.

          I sat down on the sofa that night and after Facebook notified me that they were getting rid of their photo app, I started scrolling through our life, once again. Each photo flashed before my eyes until I saw one last thing that sparked tears… a forgotten photo of Isaac that emanated joy. The next day, I received a message from a family friend that I hadn’t spoken to in over a decade and what she told me would send me on an upward spiral and send me on a journey to discover what had been true all along… Isaac was still right beside us.