Was I emotionally ready to move on, to actually remove my husband’s books and papers that hadn’t been touched in years?

It began with a casual remark.

“I don’t know what to do,” I complained to my best friend. “I write at my desk, just a few feet away from the refrigerator, or, even worse, in the kitchen, so I can see the flowers on the deck. Every time I need to think about something, I make a trip to the fridge for inspiration. Every chapter of my book is another pound on the scale!”

“You know, you do have other floors in your house. You could work somewhere else,” she answered.

Hmm, why didn’t that occur to me? I live in a house in Brooklyn, New York which, according to my real estate tax form, was built in 1898. Needless to say, the pipes and wiring have been significantly modernized, and the house itself looks quite up-to-date.

The attic has two rooms, one that served as my late husband’s office, and the other as a bedroom for various offspring as they craved more privacy from their siblings. My son, Saadya ztz”l, was the last occupant of this bedroom, and it looks pretty much the same as it did the day he moved into an apartment of his own almost four years ago.

I have to admit that the memories had made me reluctant to visit the attic, and it had basically turned into a huge storage area: luggage, semi-working fans, space heaters, boxes of new items that might have to be returned in this millennium, questionable clothing items whose ultimate fate has yet to be determined, and clothing that’s waiting to be picked up by some tzedakah organization I have yet to call littered the floor, all fulfilling the principal of physics which states that “Possessions rise to fill vacant spaces.”