Today marked the end of the lease for the old apartment Derek and I moved into in April of 2003.  After grabbing some lunch and picking up some cat litter at the pet store, I headed over to the old apartment complex to turn in the keys.  Before going to the office, I decided to take one last walk through the apartment to make sure I hadn't missed anything — having checked and double-checked and triple-checked before now, I knew I hadn't, but that was the best excuse I could come up with for going inside one last time.

I walked from room to room reminiscing about what has been lost and the life this place represented.  With the apartment now empty, it easily reminded me of the first time Derek and I had seen it during our apartment hunting.  Seeing it devoid of furniture and other signs of occupancy, it was as if I had stepped back in time to April of 2003.

I walked through the apartment, room to room, taking in the aura still left there.  There's Derek's room, I thought, and Derek's office.  Here's where Derek sat when watching television before he was hospitalized.  Here's where Derek sat in his wheelchair to watch television during that all too brief time when he came home from the hospital.  Here's where I found Derek on the floor, unable to move and unable to call for help, that fateful day when I returned home from work and finally called 911 — the day Derek went into the hospital and began the difficult final two years of his life.  Here's where Kako would often fall down in front of his wheelchair so that he couldn't pass, forcing him to pay attention to her (this was a game they both loved to play despite how much he voiced consternation and frustration over the practice).  There's the bathroom Jenny and I spent a whole day cleaning and disinfecting after Derek was hospitalized because he had gotten so sick in there over those last few days.  This is the patio he loved so much but couldn't use when he came home from the hospital because of his wheelchair.  There's the window he was looking out when the brain tumor kicked in and temporarily took his ability to function (which it later gave back only briefly before taking it permanently).  And the list goes on…

I began to cry as the memories flooded over me.  I continued to roam from room to room, each one providing a fresh new deluge of emotions and images and voices.

Seeing the place empty allowed me to run the entire gambit of memories, from seeing it for the first time before deciding to rent it to bringing Jenny over to let her see it to moving in to Derek's rapid decline and hospitalization to the day I called his father to let him know about Derek's latest diagnosis and prognosis to helping his family pack and move his things to his hometown to my own packing and moving.

After touring the entire place several times, I said goodbye to the ghosts which lived there and left the apartment feeling as though I had started to move on with my life.

I still miss Derek.  I still feel grief and anger and a menagerie of emotions both positive and negative.  Grieving is a process; I am still working my way through that process.