{"id":34373,"date":"2021-10-02T00:01:15","date_gmt":"2021-10-02T07:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=34373"},"modified":"2026-06-06T12:11:57","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T12:11:57","slug":"widowed-do-i-stay-or-do-i-move","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/widowed-do-i-stay-or-do-i-move\/","title":{"rendered":"Widowed: Do I Stay or Do I Move?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Widowed<\/a>
Widowed, do I stay or do I move? And will these stairs force a decision some day? Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I’ve been asking myself lately, now that I am widowed, do I stay or do I move?<\/p>\n

And the answer is — I seem to have turned into one of those stubborn old women who refuses to leave her house.<\/p>\n

Jon and I gave the let’s-move impulse a trial run a few years ago. It was a thought experiment that lasted, oh, maybe a couple of months. It involved me going around to local open houses to look for a nice, level-in house where we could do what gerontologists and real estate agents like to call aging in place.<\/p>\n

A good idea, a practical idea. After all, ours is a three-story house that you enter up top through the garage at the bedroom level. The next floor down is the kitchen, dining and living rooms. Another floor down, my office. Then, outdoors you take a third flight of (now beautiful<\/a>) stairs to the backyard.<\/p>\n

It’s not a good house for people with knee problems or vertigo. It’s not a good house for old people.<\/p>\n

And so, three years ago, I did my due diligence. I went house hunting. I looked at level-in houses — in our price range and way, way out of it.<\/p>\n

Most were perfectly nice houses. Convenient. Pretty. Suitable for doing that aging-in-place thing.<\/p>\n

But they were somebody else’s house. Not ours.<\/p>\n

The house on a hill that Jon and I bought as newlyweds is far from perfect. The living room is small. The flat screen TV shares a room with the laundry. (Do I do the laundry, or do I catch the next episode of “Anne with an E”?)<\/p>\n

\"widowed,<\/a>
At our house, the flat screen TV shares a room with the laundry. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But it’s home. It’s where Jon, I and — for an ever-so-brief moment in time — our children have lived since 1978.<\/p>\n

And now, it seems, I’ve become one of those old women who refuses to leave her house.<\/p>\n

I used to be an adventurer.<\/p>\n

After college, when most of my friends in Michigan were getting married, I spent a year in Europe. After that, I lived in New York City, then split for San Francisco, where I hung out with hippies, feminists<\/a>, and the long-haired, antiwar journalist Jon Newhall.<\/p>\n

So, if I’m an adventurer, how did I wind up parked in this old house on a hill? What was it I was searching for in my peripatetic <\/i><\/b><\/a>youth?\u00a0 Meaning? Adventure? Romance? Fame?<\/p>\n

Whatever it was, I seem to have found it, here in this house.<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a>
An adventuresome young tourist in Germany the summer before my senior year in college.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"widowed<\/a><\/p>\n

Have I turned into one of those stubborn old women who refuses to leave her house?\u00a0 Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49430,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[2511,34,2512,82,2513,2514,2419],"class_list":["post-34373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-widowed","tag-age-in-place","tag-dont-miss","tag-old-woman","tag-on-the-funny-side","tag-stairs","tag-stay-in-my-house","tag-widowed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34373"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49432,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34373\/revisions\/49432"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}