Two months after the death of Anna “Chickadee” Cardwell, her widower Eldridge Toney is opening up about taking a big step on his journey to healing amid grief.
Toney tells PEOPLE that he recently found the emotional strength to put away some of his wife’s belongings after leaving them untouched since Cardwell’s death from stage 4 adrenal cancer in December.
“I wasn’t in the bedroom because everything was the way she left it,” he explains. “The last night we were in the bedroom was actually the day before she decided to go into hospice.”
“All those feelings of being tired of that room down there, especially all her things that are exactly as they were when we were there…” she continues. “It was just hard to get down in the room, and I feel like that was one big thing that kind of, like, gave me anxiety about the house, but it was also the time in the same sense.”
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Anna Cardwell and Eldridge Toney on the beach in 2021.
Anna Cardwell Instagram
Toney said he knew it was “time” to put away some of Cardwell’s belongings, saying: “We have two wardrobes in the bedroom and I put all her clothes together and put them in bins and a lot of other things that were important to her. He hung I took off her wedding dress and closed the door.”
“I have access to it, but it’s not out there the way she left it,” she notes. “Well yeah, I had everything in the back closet with the door closed, but I left some things out, you know, she had them out and I wanted to keep them out.”
He said: “For example, one of her fans sent her some healing crystals and I put them on the dresser for her and they are still on the dresser along with our photo.”
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Although Toney has begun the process of reorganizing the couple’s home, he is not yet ready to sleep in their bedroom.
“I’ll work on it,” he says. “It’s a process, but some days I’ll just go there and lie down. I’m not going to sleep, but I just spent some time inside. I will continue to spend more time in the room so that when I decide to sleep there, it will not be so in my face.”
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Anna Cardwell and Eldridge Toney.
Anna Cardwell/Instagram
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Days after Cardwell’s death in December, Toney opened up to PEOPLE about how his life changed after losing his wife.
“It’s hitting me again,” he said of his grief at the time. “It’s going to be a lot different.”
Toney admitted that the thought of “returning to our home without Anna and without the girls” was “hard to fathom”. Seeing empty rooms in the home they once shared and waking up in the morning to find Cardwell missing was “very difficult”.
“It will be very lonely,” he added. “It’s getting harder.”
PEOPLE previously confirmed that Cardwell and Toney tied the knot on March 4 in Wilkinson County, Georgia.
The couple began dating in 2017 following Cardwell’s divorce from ex-husband Michael Cardwell, with whom she had a daughter, Kylee Madison, in 2015. Cardwell was also the mother of a daughter, Kaitlyn Elizabeth, born in 2012.
“We decided to get married after we were diagnosed with stage 4,” Toney explains to PEOPLE. “We didn’t get married because she had cancer. We just sped up the process because it was always something we planned to do.”
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