The first, first anniversary

One year ago today I settled on my house in Hamilton, picked up the keys from the realtor, then went to the house, unlocked the door, and walked inside for the first time as owner. It was the first time I’d ever done that without Nigel, and I got to that point a bit less than four months after he died.

It was a lot of work (physical, emotional, organisational, etc.) to get to that point, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that without the support of the family, especially my brother-in-law, who came to Auckland to attend meetings with me, went to the realtor in Hamilton with me so I could sign the contract to purchase, and, in general, helped me work out what I was going to do. Throughout the process, I’d been terrified that the brain fog I was in (both from grief and the prescriptions I was on) would mean I’d miss something important. I didn’t, not the least because I had backup.

Over the following 12 days, I had the new house wired for Ethernet, a heat pump installed in the master bedroom, and the set-up prepared so my computer servers could be relocated to the new house. My brother-in-law coordinated all that for me (important because I was still in Auckland at the old house) and arranged for the IT people to come to the old house to turn off and take away the servers (I wouldn’t have had a clue how to pack them up myself). Over the following days, they cleaned up and streamlined those servers for me, and then came to the house to install everything.

I’ll have more to say about all this on the anniversary of the day I moved in, but today, for me, is about reflection and gratitude. It’s been a pretty crap year, of course, for a whole lot of reasons, but my single-minded determination to keep moving forward got me through it, and the support of the entire family provided the base I could safely build on. All of which is what got me to the point I could put that key in the lock to the front door of my new house for the first time as owner, one year ago today.

This post began as a post on my personal Facebook, when I shared the Facebook "Memory" at the top of this post. I also published a post about this last year, when it happened.