A while back, oh, let’s be honest, several years ago, my little push mower that I used on my Tiffway yard stopped working. Just wouldn’t roll. I poked at it for a while then just set it aside. Another thing in my life that didn’t work. Yesterday, for the first time in a long while, the repair bug touched my soul. I disassembled the little mower, found the broken bit, fixed it. Got my hands dirty, tested my patience, kept at it. Now it rolls clean and true and I mowed the little yard.

In keeping with that repair spirit, my broken electric drier, the one that stopped working day before yesterday, now sits in pieces in my utility room. I’m going to fix it. It might be hard. It might be easy. But I’ll get it done, just as I did countless times before in the youth of my marriage and the youth of my life, when that’s what a man did. Fixed things. Feels good to be back in the fixing game. In this case, I can take my time, because wind and sun have been known to dry clothes, and they’ll do it while I work.

I do believe this is another step in my grief journey that fits right in there with me painting doors and mulching flower beds. The loss of my wife is still real but the work I’ve done to deal with it has pushed its way into my everyday life as I begin to make right the broken things, the things in disrepair. Nothing is as it was before because then it was new and it worked. This is now, when things, including me, are worn around the edges but still work because I can fix things, including me, and this is how we will all get on in that dance called life.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale