After her mother died, Yemi spent three weeks clearing the house.
The estate agent had given her a timeline and she had accepted it mechanically, the way you accept things in the weeks after grief arrives. She bought flat-pack boxes and drove to the house every morning at eight and started with the easiest rooms and worked toward the difficult ones.
The living room was hardest. Not because of what was in it — the furniture was ordinary, the pictures were the pictures of an ordinary life — but because her mother had lived in it. Had sat in the chair by the window every evening for forty years. Had drunk tea from the mug on the side table. Had watched the same programme every Thursday.
Yemi sat in the chair on the third week.
She didn't mean to. She meant to remove it. But she sat in it first, just to — she didn't know why. To be in the shape her mother had worn into the world. To feel what the chair felt.
She sat there for two hours.
When she stood up, something had changed. Not resolved — grief doesn't resolve in an afternoon. But changed. The weight she'd been carrying since the hospital phone call had shifted, slightly, the way a load shifts when you adjust your grip. Still heavy. But differently heavy. A weight she now understood she could carry.
She finished the boxes. She gave the chair to someone who needed it.
She drove home lighter, by something she couldn't have named if you'd asked her.
The weight doesn't leave. You grow to carry it differently.
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