After My Husband Died, I Escaped The Big City To Start Over

I stand in front of my new home and watch as a crew of workers tears my driveway apart. I look on with equal parts horror and curiosity as they cut through concrete and dig a massive trench, nine-feet deep, stretching from the street toward the back of my turn-of-the-century house. This emergency work is destructive, necessary and expensive. I stare into the deepening crevice below. 

I did my first load of laundry in my new home the day before. I’d been looking forward to using my very own washer and dryer ever since I put an offer on the house months earlier, sight unseen, upped my offer, and then upped it again. I bought my first home on a particularly auspicious full moon toward the end of the 2020 pandemic summer in a hot market. It was the beginning of a mass exodus from Toronto, and I was finally making my escape to Belleville—a little under three hours east along the 401—from a too-big city I’d grown up in, but only moved back to for my husband and to be closer to family. I ultimately chose Belleville with my head more than my heart: It was part way between Toronto and Montreal, both places I consider to be home, it’s a stop on the VIA train line, and it’s just across the Bay from Prince Edward County. As a first-time home buyer taking the leap on my own, my home needed to be a solid investment as well as a soft landing for me. 

A little less than two years after Remi passed, I moved out of our Riverdale home and into a one-bedroom apartment in the Beaches neighbourhood in Toronto. When the pandemic hit, it felt like the walls were actively closing in on me. This apartment was only ever meant to be a stopgap, a soft landing after loss. I was living in limbo, somewhere between the life that had been ripped away from me when Remi died suddenly one morning in June 2017 from a cardiac event, and the new life that I was slowly building. 

Remi and I had been saving to buy our first home when I became a widow at the age of 31. The pain of losing him was wild, somatic. Now I was here, in a big house in an unfamiliar town where I knew no one, wondering whether I’d made the right move.  

***

On laundry day, I ceremoniously opened the door of my gleaming white front-loading washing machine, located on the second floor, and popped my first load in, selected the cycle and went back downstairs to continue unpacking.     

It wasn’t long before I heard the unmistakable sound of water splashing onto the dirt floor of the cellar. Panic. I rushed down the crooked makeshift steps to see water seeping over the edge of the ancient laundry sink. I sprinted back up to the washing machine and stopped the cycle. I grabbed the plunger, threw on my boots, trudged back down the stairs and set to work. 

After some frantic plunging, the sink was merely brimming and had mercifully ceased overflowing. I called the city emergency line. A team of workers arrived almost immediately. Cue a steady stream of men tromping through my newly bought, freshly cleaned house, tracking sewage on the bottoms of their boots. Things got much worse before they got any better. I locked my cat in a bedroom, slung the still sudsy and sopping wet load of laundry into the dryer, and sat on my steps worrying about how much the repairs would cost. 

I called my parents in tears and asked them if I’d made a terrible mistake buying a house on my own and moving to a small town where I knew absolutely no one. The realization that I would have nowhere to sleep and no easy way to get to Toronto at a moment’s notice if I needed to, felt at once heavy and very fragile. 

None of this was how I’d imagined it. 

***

This wasn’t the first time I’d started over in a new place. I moved from Toronto to Montreal after high school. And just a few years later, still in the early days of our relationship, I moved across an ocean with Remi, who was starting a postdoctoral position as a research scientist at the University of Geneva. We lived in Switzerland for six years. We got married in Neuchatel in the city’s medieval town hall, made a home in a mountainside apartment at the edge of a forest in Zurich, and I completed a Master’s degree. Life was good. We would have continued living our fantasy life together in Switzerland had our visas not been rejected in 2013. 

I felt utterly defeated and displaced as we gave away nearly all of our belongings, shipping only art and books back to Canada and packing whatever clothes we could fit into two suitcases each. We landed in Montreal just as the leaves were changing colours, and later that winter, we made Toronto our home. It was the sensible choice: I had family and friends in Toronto and the job prospects were good. I wanted so badly to move back to Europe; my wanderlust wasn’t yet spent, but Remi’s had been exhausted. 

When Remi died, I lost him, the life we had and the life we’d planned to have together. Gone too were the things we’d wanted: the house, the kids, the hiking holidays in Iceland, Scotland and Patagonia, retiring in Slovenia and learning a new language to stay sharp in our old age, keeping bees, making honey and growing our own food. 

The author and her late husband, Remi, on their wedding day. (Photo: Courtesy Allison Nichol Longtin)

These are secondary losses that, even now, continue to reveal themselves to me in all their profound unfairness. I was left with a horrible, terrible freedom I never wanted or asked for. Now it often feels that’s all I have. This young widow’s consolation prize: complete and utter freedom.  

When Remi and I moved back to Canada, I resisted our new reality. I struggled with disenfranchised grief over losing the life we’d worked so hard to create in Switzerland. We talked about one day moving to a smaller town in Canada to escape big city life, but Remi couldn’t see how we could realistically make this plan work. When he died, I knew I could go anywhere—maybe even back to Switzerland. But I stayed in our little apartment in Toronto for nearly two years, unable to leave the last place he’d called home. 

When the pandemic hit and I started working remotely, I knew I could make my dream of homeownership in a small town a reality. I’d been learning and relearning since Remi died that no one was coming to rescue me. There was only me. I wasn’t going to wait to be in a relationship again to buy a house and start a new life. 

***

The workmen from the city showed me the damaged pipe that connected my house to the city’s sewage system. It was original to the house and had been flattened over time, irreparably crushed. It urgently needed to be replaced. I would have to clean up the ankle-deep mess that covered the cellar floor on my own. That night it was just me, a mop, a bucket and some cleaning products. I cried and raged, questioned my life choices, wondered aloud how I’d gotten here, yelled at Remi for leaving me all alone, asked him to please help me, and gave myself a much-needed pep talk as I cleaned up the wastewater, one filthy bucket at a time.  

The excavators were quick with their work, leaving only a cracked driveway, tire tracks and a large invoice behind. Three years later, I still haven’t had the driveway resurfaced; it still bears the scars of my baptism by fire (or sewage) and my initiation into solo-homeownership. Before they left, the workers told me I’d have to wait at least a year before having the driveway repaired and repaved; the earth would need time to resettle. Their guidance echoes that given to people grieving the death of a loved one: avoid making any major life decisions in the first year. Wait until the dust settles.  

The home I’m making—our home—is an homage to my love for Remi. It’s filled with the art and thrifted pottery we collected abroad, a few photos of him, us, his paintings and sketches, his Nana’s lamps, his mother’s quilts and vintage furniture, and the plants and cat we cared for together.

Remi would have loved this house. I can see him grilling on the back deck I had built where once there was a cracked and caving-in concrete pad. When I’m working in the garden, I imagine him tending to a lush and sprawling veggie patch. I’ve had pest control on speed dial since I swatted a mouse out of the kitchen using a broom as a hockey stick while my cat looked on in horror. There’s little else more satisfying to me than rearranging the furniture, moving art and plants around. Loving my turn-of-the-century home back into health honours my husband, our love, and is testament to my own resilience, strength and ability to rebuild out of the rubble of my old life.