I found the suitcase containing letters Aidan wrote to me when I was 17

Ihad been thinking about it for a number of years and last year I made the decision to sell my home of 35 years. I’m not getting any younger, so I bought into the buzz words of ‘future proofing’, and moved. It’s said moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do and I now agree. There are so many facets to moving but my biggest challenge was sifting through 35 years of ‘stuff’ to decide what to keep, throw out, recycle or donate.

I hadn’t thought deeply enough about the task of packing up a life time of memories, to transport to a house without memories oozing from its walls.

I could do it with detached emotion, couldn’t I? Sure. That was before I waded into the thick volumes of family life scattered in every drawer, cupboard, wardrobe and corner of the house. Don’t mention the attic. I’ll get back to that.

I never realised how much stuff we had accumulated until it was recovered from resting places and laid out before me. I must have packed eight large boxes with photographs, with the intention of calling the family to the new house to sort them.

It hasn’t happened yet, but while packing them away the kids had such a laugh seeing some of the photos for the first time.

I tackled the decluttering with the intention of being emotionally detached.

Sure how could I be emotionally attached to stuff others class as junk?

Things like the plastic kitchen clock, a wedding present from 1982. It still worked!

And is now in the new house. Mmm. Strange thing, emotional attachment.

I left the attic until last. I’d assumed there was only Christmas decorations in it. We tackled it on the Sunday of moving the week. I’d clear it in an hour, I thought. It took two days.

Since my husband died in 2009, the attic had only been used to store Christmas decorations. But once the crumbling boxes and dusty bags started to appear down the ladder I realised all that had been stored there prior to Aidan’s death.

Granted, most were boxes of toys and teddy bears. The children had grown up, so why keep them? I have no idea, except maybe I had inherited the hoarding gene from my mother.

Boxes of baby cards, birthday cards, anniversary cards. Three cardboard boxes of newspapers from the 1980s. I still have no idea why they were kept. They were sent to the recycling depot without the mystery being solved. At least we had no mice in the attic!

Then I found the suitcase containing letters Aidan wrote to me when I was 17, while he was on peacekeeping duty in Lebanon. Reading over his words stirred memories I had supressed deep inside of me.

Just to see his handwriting, which never changed over the years. To read his words and hear them in his voice. Visualising him sitting on his bunk in Naqoura in Lebanon writing on the flimsy airmail paper, shot me back to my teenage life.

There were letters from his time in Finner

Camp, where he wrote with the date and time he’d phone me, so that I could be waiting by the phone. Our children found it hard to understand this. No mobiles, email or social media.

But his letters brought me right back to that time. I could see myself waiting by the white dial-up phone, standing on the brown and orange hall of my own family home. Watching the time tick by on my wristwatch. Willing him to ring before one of the neighbours arrived to make a call. We had the only phone on the terrace and our hall was often like a telephone exchange.

The letters brought memories of Aidan rushing at me, and I wondered if I was making the right decision in moving house. He died when our children were teenagers. He has missed so much of their lives – weddings, grandchildren etc. But everything before and after, was anchored to our family home.

It wasn’t until I visited his grave this Christmas, that it struck me that he would never again have to haul himself up into the attic to store things no one wanted; that he would never know my new home.

What made me think these thoughts at that precise time standing by his grave? The inscription on his headstone. It had the address of the house we’d bought with a mortgage we couldn’t afford, in which we’d raised our children together up until his death. My move seemed so final. I wondered if he would find me if he came looking for me.

I suddenly felt a lightness of being. Hard to describe, but I knew I had done the right thing. I brushed the frost off the holly wreath. I didn’t need a house, an address or a suitcase of old letters to remember him. I had all the memories in my heart. And he wouldn’t have to come looking for me, because he was still walking every step by my side.