Helping Shelter Kids Pick Out Halloween Costumes Taught Me Lessons I’ll Never Forget

The months that followed were a fog of grief. I avoided calls, letters, and even the simplest inquiries from kind neighbors, because the house was too big, too silent, too suffused with reminders of what had been taken from me.

I moved through my days as though on autopilot: showering, eating, transitioning from room to room, existing but not living, inhabiting a shell where grief had hollowed out every corner.

Then, one cold afternoon in late October, the numbness cracked.

I was at a bus stop downtown, waiting aimlessly, merely moving to escape the oppressive silence of home, when my eyes caught a flyer pinned to the community bulletin board:

“Halloween Costume Drive — Help Our Kids Celebrate!”

Bright-eyed children in costumes smiled up at me from the page, and something — hope, perhaps, or the faintest glimmer of possibility — shifted in my chest, a fragile, trembling crack forming in the armor of numbness I had worn for months.

That evening, I climbed into the attic, a place I had long avoided because it was full of dust-covered boxes and the memories of a life that no longer existed.Continue reading…