Spaces That Hold Us

You don’t always know what you’ll need after someone dies.

I was watching a series the other night—The Madison—about a woman whose husband is killed in a plane crash.

A quiet, wide-open space in Montana.

A place he loved.

One he visited often.

She never visited.

Not even once. She was a city girl—New York City—Madison Avenue—hence the title of the series.

She flies out, for the first time, to the place he loved, to bury him. When she returns home, it becomes increasingly difficult to live in her city. After his death, in most of the scenes, she is sullen. Sad. Angry. Unhappy.

Places that once defined her sense of home become strangling.

She leaves gatherings that were once enjoyable.

A coffee shop that she and her husband used to go to is suddenly too hard to enter.

She strikes out at her therapist.

She drinks too much.

Nothing works to relieve her pain.

And then—

With nowhere else to run,

she goes back to the valley where she buried her husband.

She wakes up on the ground, next to his grave, in that quiet, open space he loved.

As she walks back to his cabin—now her cabin—it’s visible in her face.

Her smile.

A full inhale—breathing in all that space.

All the heaviness.

All the burden of carrying it

Lifted.

I loved that contrast of space. It was such a theme for me when my husband died. My growing discomfort with the space that was once my home was just the opposite—

in our house and acres of land that suddenly felt too big,

too extravagant for one person. Day after day, my grief grew heavier.

For me, space was all I had.

The house that had been just right for my husband and me was now too big.

Everywhere I looked, there was more of it.

More rooms.

More of his things I didn’t know what to do with.

More of what had been ours.

I, too, became overwhelmed by the place I once called home.

What I needed was not more open space—but less of it.

So I purchased an old RV and renovated it.

The first night in it, when I crawled up over the cab

into my cozy bed, I could see my entire new home.

Small.

Comfortable.

A space I could handle.

A space that could hold me.

Ground me.

I slept like a baby.

She found her way back to wide, open space—

where, just like that, the weight of her grief is lifted.

I found mine in the small space of my RV—

where I could finally set it down.

Grief not gone, but in spaces that could hold it.

This memoir is about the spaces that held me.

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