NOVEMBER 20
Take time to plan your future...If it is financially possible
for you, stay in your own home, with the familiar things
around you.
Later, if you go away, if you travel, even if you decide to
make your home elsewhere, the spirit of tenderness, of love,
will not desert you. You will find that it has become part of
you, rising from within yourself; and because of it you are
no longer fearful of loneliness, of the dark, because death,
the last enemy, has been overcome.
—DAPHNE DU MAURIERThe painter Andrew Wyeth, when asked why he didn’t
travel around more, is reputed to have said, “The familiar
frees me.”
Perhaps the familiar also frees us to grieve, even as it
wraps around us with memory and its own comfort.
Or it may keep us in bondage. After her husband’s death,
a friend removed from her house almost immediately the
old brown chair he most often sat in. It was one way of ac-
knowledging that he was gone, that her life had entered a
new chapter. For someone else, it might have been a comfort
to sit in that chair. We each have to find our own way.
I will be careful, knowing the familiar can free me or imprison me.