I’m often still taken by surprise when being able to do some tasks are often a day by day proposition.  Mostly these are tasks to do with Ian, but not always. Often this freeze is not so much in the sense of having a ‘bad’ day, but just a day of not wanting to go there.

Just prior to Christmas I was working on swapping which rooms are used for what around in my house. In order to achieve the swap around I needed, I reached a point I had to do something with a pile of Ian’s clothes.  This was his ‘not much of this is in regular use’ pile of clothes that took up a closet and a dresser, that I’d been …umm…  asking… him to sort through for a good year, if not longer.

The first day of the swap around, there was no way I could have gone through the clothes and parted with them.  I was so frazzled simply trying to juggle stuff so we had room to work and paint, that it made trying to make decisions on keep/donate/toss just impossible and I would have been screaming like a banshee if I attempted it.  

But the next day, I was surprised how easy a task it was to work through a pile of clothes that, for the most part, I never saw Ian wear AND to actually make decisions on what to do with each individual piece.  I’d planned to pack them all away in a box or suitcase to be dealt with at a later time, but I found I could do the keep/donate/toss right then and there.

There were some items I kept aside as they did hold memories, but I still filled my trunk with clothes and was even able to take them immediately to an emergency assistance shelter so they could be used, rather than sitting in my house, frankly mocking me because he’d not done the sort out before he got sick.  

I’ve had a couple more days since where I’ve been able to work through a box here, folder there – I’m learning to grab them when they come; the desire to tidy the place up and de-clutter pre-dates Ian’s illness and death, and is still there.  

It’s just some of the decisions are harder.