It would take me a long time to reach the good place where I am now, but that afternoon was a beginning

It was 1999, and I was doing laundry. I walked past my son's bedroom, a room that was immortalized with everything in place exactly as it had been six months earlier, when he was alive. I felt a tiny wave of strength surface, a glimmer of faith bringing me to understand I was ready to begin the process of letting go of his things. But I needed to do it in baby steps.

I cleared out a stack of his outgrown clothes. It was the only way my mother’s heart could manage the task. 

He was fifteen years old when he left this earth, and I let go first of what no longer would have fit him. Slowly, over a period of time, I gave away all of my son’s clothes, keeping only his sweatshirt for me to breath in the scent of him, to bury my face in long nights of remembering.

Next I began tossing things from my own well-stocked closet, giving away good quality items I seldom wore—clothing that no longer fit the newly evolving me. Each month I eyeballed my closet and convinced myself to part with more and more. At the time it didn’t occur to me that I was beginning to walk toward a stress-free lifestyle of owning less. Read more