I’m running out of boxes again.

Back in January, I went to a local store to pick up boxes so I could store the books and stuff I had to move out of our study so I could paint it and turn it into my bedroom. I was not sleeping well in the bedroom we shared for 17 years and, after doing some reading, decided swapping into another room with a radically different layout would help.

I went in planning to buy ten boxes. Surely, I thought, that will be more than enough. But I let the clerk talk me into buying a bundle of 25 with the promise that anything I did not use they would buy back. Within two days, I was glad I had agreed to that plan. Who knew two bookcases could hold so much? By the time I was done with packing that one room, I was nearly out of boxes.

So I bought a second bundle, convinced this time I would have some to give back.

Today, I am down to one box with three-quarters of a bookshelf  and several shelves of silk flowers and holiday decorations in the craft room to get through.

I will admit Jane and I were both pack-rats. In my case it was genetic. When my brothers and sisters went to Pittsburgh to move my grandparents from one house to another, they threw out something on the order of two truckloads. The family Bible got lost in the shuffle for about ten years when I found it in the attic of the new house among my grandfather’s household records and correspondence. The man had a record of what he spent on underwear for himself and his family–including the receipts–from the mid-1930s.

I’ve already chronicled the emotional difficulties of this particular piece of the clean-up and reorganization. This room was entirely hers–and every item reminds me of her and the things she liked to do–and wanted to do. She loved cross-stitch. I found not only patterns and kits for projects she had not yet started, but finished designs she had put aside to surprise me with at some future point, as well as three major projects she had started at some point and never come back to.

There were books on learning to play the recorder–an instrument she had taken up just after we got married–and a book on teaching yourself guitar–a thing she had taken up just before she got sick. There were books on learning to paint, on carpentry, on birdhouses… Her future plans are in there just as clearly as her past.

But that future is cut off. And my own future is suddenly different than it was.

Who knew a zebra would prove more deadly–in so many ways–than any cobra or any Bengal tiger? It killed her body, it killed her future, it killed our dreams. It has left me sifting through the detritus of our life together.

But it has done more than make me sad. It has made me angry. And out of that sadness and anger, I have found a new purpose and a new future. While it may not hold the same joy as the future we believed we had, that zebra will remember us.