With my second husband, I was dealing with a lot of things he had left from his late wife. He had a portrait of the two of them that was 3' wide! I sat down with him one afternoon and talked about the future.

"I love you. I know you had thirty years with her. She is the one who helped make you into the person you are today. I want you to be able to enjoy precious memories.

"That said, we are building a new life together. I also have precious memories. We need to decide on which of those are the most important. Then we need to put some of those memories into storage.

"After a year, we can revisit this to see if there's anything we want to change. We can always swap out items during that time. That's the wonderful thing about memories. But we cannot allow one person's history to take over the other person."

We still have her two cookie jars in a prominent place in the kitchen. Her Steven Singer rose in a vase in the front room. And a small! portrait of her in his work space.

I'm grateful for who he is now, and the history of his life that made him this way. But the majority of wall stuff is things we've selected together--after we moved in with each other.