Move the Furniture!

Grief has a way of turning your living room into a museum; the imagery of the empty chair. So, we leave the chair where it was. We leave the room exactly as it felt the last time there was joy in it. We do this because we're afraid that if we change the room, we'll change the memory.

But staying stuck in the memorial phase doesn’t honor the dead; it paralyzes the living.

I’ve been there. I’ve sat in the silence, stuck in the absence of my son, staring at where he should be. It’s a comfortable kind of misery; the kind that promises you’ll never forget, as if a mother’s heart could ever forget. She won't.

One day last year, I realized that the empty chair wasn’t a connection. It had become a roadblock. It was the physical manifestation of “what if” and “if only,” two questions that have never successfully rebuilt a bridge to anywhere.

So, move the chair. Put it in the den. Sell it. Use it for something else entirely.

When you move the furniture, you aren’t clearing away the memory of who you lost. You’re clearing a path for the woman you are becoming. You’re telling your brain that the house is still a home, even if the guest list has changed. You’re choosing to live in the present, which is the only place where true healing actually happens. It’s time.