Hey, Rap:

My heart goes out to you. That's the hard reality of losing someone.. loving memories associated with a particular place make it painful to go there.

A few days ago, I noticed the woman across the street had hired a couple of college kids to drag everything out of her two car garage (and basement too, from the looks of the pile.) She's a widow and lost her husband at least six or seven years ago, because we've lived here for five years and he had passed away quite a while before we came. I think that it's probably taken her this long to reach the point where she could face looking at some things that have built-in memories. My Father died seven years ago, sitting in his recliner. He'd had a stroke and was waiting with two nurses and my Mother for the ambulance to come. It was a tense situation, and my Father was doing everything that he could to loosen people up, kidding around and cracking jokes. Right in the middle of all this gaiety, my Father pitched forward face first onto the floor and was dead. My Father is one of the few people who literally "died laughing." After the funeral when everyone headed home and my Mother was left alone, she couldn't bear to look at that recliner, because she'd see my Father there, and relive that whole experience.
She got rid of the chair. The memory took longer to soften.

May yours soften, Rap.

Jerry