Moving Forward

Shell Here!

When Art first died, I wanted to move away. My motives were very obvious because two hours after they took his lifeless, cold body away, I grabbed my daughter and her puppy and we left. When we left that day, I never wanted to come back. For me, the life I lived with Art was dead. I was numb and yet my heart was shattered into a million pieces. On the day he died, one of the hardest parts was watching them wheel my cold, dead, lifeless husband’s body out of our home. That day was the day a big piece of me died as well. When they took my husband, they took my entire life that I thought I knew with him. It was gone; it was over and everything I knew was now shattered.

A few hours later, Jay and I checked into a hotel, and I knew at that moment I never wanted to come back. I was looking into movers who would pack up my home and real estate agents to sell our home. I was looking at ads to buy a condo, and I felt that was my only option in order to not feel the deep pain; I had to never return to the home I shared with Art. The pain was so intense and paralyzing, there were moments where I couldn’t breathe just from thinking of going back to that house where he died. One time during our marriage, our next-door neighbor died. I was so freaked out, and I had never even gone in that house. Here I was with a home that I shared with my daughter and husband, and now it felt tainted and full of grief. I felt I would never be able to go back.

Twenty days later, a remarkably close friend who is still in our lives today came to the hotel and helped us go back home. He knew I never wanted to go back there, but he reminded me that in order for me to move away one day, I had to go back and handle everything before I abandoned my life at the house. To this day I am grateful to him for helping me realize that I needed to deal with my grief and emotional baggage head on. He was with us and walked with us through the front door on our very first night back at the house where Art died. It took me almost forty minutes to get the courage to walk back into the home, and he patiently stood by our side until we were ready. I will never forget this for as long as I live. Going back to our home was just as hard as watching them take Art away. I felt very alone and that no one else in our life understood how hard it was for us to come back to our home except for our one friend. In fact, when we were hiding away, he is the one that came to the hotel a week later and coerced out of the hotel. He took us shopping and he wanted to take us out to eat. We ended up getting our food to go and taking it back to the hotel because just being out in the world for a couple of hours was too much and he understood that.

Fast forward to 2019, and we were on our every two-year vacation to Oahu. This time in Oahu, there were discoveries and aha moments. Being in Hawaii is always magical, not only because we were on vacation, but because I realized that I only remembered Art when I wanted to remember him. It was freeing and it was something I wanted in my life forever: freedom with grief. I loved being able to only remember Art when I wanted to and not because it was thrown in my face every day. Allow me to explain. Here at our home and hometown, I am stuck with cancer memories constantly being thrown at my face. If I go to the doctor’s office, it is the same building where they told us Art had stage four pancreatic cancer. If we go to my daughters’ doctor, it is the same building where we went to twenty-two rounds of chemo and endless visits to the urgent care. Both hospitals in this area are triggers and constant reminders of cancer. There are certain streets where I followed the ambulance scared to death that by the time we reach the ER, he may be dead. We constantly run into people from our past. Heck, even our home is a constant reminder of cancer even after we remodeled.

In Hawaii, far away from here, those constant pains thrown in my face were gone! I was happily remembering Art the way I wanted to remember him without cancer. It was freeing and that is when I decided it was time to start making plans for our big move. Before we move though, we decided to stay here for a while longer so that we can heal ourselves from Art’s traumatic cancer journey. One of our plans for doing this is to write our book.

Writing our book is a way for us to release the cancer journey and to share it. I have been holding tightly onto the entire events of the fifteenth months of our cancer journey, and it is heavy. It is weighing me down. One step I need to take is to release this weight of my past so when I move and start over, I am not carrying this excessive baggage with me. I also like the idea that these memories will be written down and if I ever want to remember them, I can refer back to our book.  By releasing these awful memories, it will allow me to remember all the good times I had with Art. I do remember them now, but they are always clouded with the cancer journey. I recognized this in Hawaii because when I thought of Art in Hawaii, I remember the twenty-five years we had before the cancer journey came and ruined our lives; that was so darn freeing!

After our trip in 2019, we came home and wrote a plan for us to move. I have two plans written out; one to move out of state and one to move of the country. I’ll do whichever comes first. I am the type of person who, since Art died, now has option A, B, C, and D. Before Art died, he was my only option and well, that did not work out so well! I want to start a new life with new memories and not constant memories of cancer. Sometimes I wished I had moved right after he died. There was no right or wrong way to do it. I also believe if I had moved right away, I was running away from the issues here at home. Now when I move, my baggage will be cleaned out and I will be ready for a fresh start. First, I am focusing on my education. Once I graduate and Jay has started her new life, it will be time for me to move forward and out. I am extremely excited for this day to come because I am not running away now; I am starting a fresh. It will be a new life in a new place with new people.

I look at my current life in this home as my stepping-stone to the future. I tell Jay all the time, I do not want to die here! I feel trapped here and I know I am not happy here. I am happy with how we’ve rebuilt our lives and the growth we have done. This is not where my story ends. I crave the freedom of a new environment, a new surrounding and new people. I crave the cancer not constantly being thrown in my face. I crave driving to new places and making new memories, not driving around this yucky town and always remembering the bad and running into people from my past. I am a new person and I am ready for a new environment. I have enjoyed the memories Jay and I have made here, and I will take those with me. I know Jay and I have so much more life to live and I know we will prosper in a new environment whether it’s option A, B, C or D. I am excited for our future now that we have planned it out well. Now the only thing I have to do is the one thing I am horrible at… being patient! I am a all in or all out person; this time I must have patience because we still have work to do here. In the meantime, I dream of our future and work on growing here so that when the time is right, we will freely move on and out. That day will be one glorious day!  

Aloha and gratitude,

Jay and Shell