A common piece of grief advice you hear after your spouse dies is that you’re not supposed to make any major decisions for the first year. On the no no list would be things like selling your house and moving; donating/giving away their stuff; quitting your job; and making a large purchase like a house or car. I did a few of these things in the first year and all of them within the first three years.

The reason behind the advice is that you should be in a sound, rational frame of mind to make a big decision, which a grief-stricken widow with brain fog is likely not. But I was convinced that selling my house and moving to a new one would help me get to the right frame of mind. We had a strong support system with many close friends in town and family in neighboring towns, so moving within our town was my goal.

The truth is that I had never loved our house. The master bedroom was on the first floor, while my daughter’s bedroom was on the second floor, an arrangement I no longer felt comfortable with after my husband died. The house was on a winding country road, and I had always wanted to raise my daughter in a neighborhood where she could walk to friends’ houses. As couples do, I had compromised on this when we bought the house five years earlier. After he died, I also associated our house with sad memories. Within a week of his death, I decided to move to another house in the same town and started preparing to sell our house.

The first step was to get rid of what we didn’t need so I could properly stage the house. This became a huge undertaking as our entire basement was filled with toys and clothes my daughter had outgrown, old furniture, and mystery boxes that we had never unpacked from our last move. I started making weekly trips to donate things Goodwill, giving away large items on Facebook, and shredding boxes worth of old documents and bills.

My husband was a bit of pack rat and never threw anything out, so I knew I couldn’t hang on to all his stuff. I decided in advance to fill a large, opaque container with the personal items that reminded me the most of him or that I wanted to keep for our daughter. It was very emotional to go through his clothes, so I did it quickly and brought the items I didn’t want to keep to Goodwill and Save a Suit on the same day.

Sorting through the stuff in the garage was a whole separate project: We owned tools and equipment that I couldn’t even identify and knew I would never use, so I gave those away to family and friends. I filled an entire dumpster with the stuff that no one wanted and Goodwill wouldn’t take. Getting my house in “sell ready” condition became my full-time job for three months (even though I still had a real full-time job).

I was almost ready to list my house when the perfect house in our town came on the market. It was a beautiful house with a pool at the end of a road with many kids my daughter’s age living on it. Best of all, the backyard backed up to the backyard of a close friend’s house, with a path connecting the two. I immediately knew that this was our house. I made an offer, we negotiated a little, then came to an agreement. As luck would have it, a week later, my house sold too.

An unexpected complication was that I needed to complete the probate process before I could legally sell the house. Since the title to the house had both my husband’s and my names on it, the probate court needed to officially remove my husband’s name from the title. This required going through the probate process quickly, which is unheard of, and added an additional stress to the already stressful process of selling a house and moving. I initially tried to tackle the probate process myself then realized I had no idea what I was doing and could mess up the whole process. So I hired a probate lawyer. In the end, the probate process completed just a few weeks before my house was scheduled to close.

In retrospect, I realized I threw myself into the project of buying a house and moving as a way of distracting myself from my husband’s death. So while moving may not be the right decision for everyone, it was the best decision for us. Our new house immediately felt like home, and it’s been the perfect place to rebuild our lives.