Oh, Erin, I really like this. You built the theme beautifully and executed it really well.
There are some repeats in there that you could weed out, though ("fears and doubts about my husband’s life before me lay in dusty, rotting heaps in front of me" ).
I think, too, I would scale back some of the more formal descriptions. Your voice is coming through pretty clearly, but every once in a while the academically trained you comes through, the one who needs every sentence to be grammatically correct.
I think this kind of piece wants a really conversational tone -- more of "I was tentative – how intrusive was it to poke and pry into the remains of my husband’s previous marriage and start tossing, keeping, storing, sending back?" and a little less of "Preemptively Xanaxed, I grimly braved the doorway, broom in hand, ready to leap back at the slightest hint of a hairy leg. Luckily, the spiders were on vacation or all suffered from social anxiety; my new neighbors declined to greet me, for which I was profoundly grateful".
Just my take, of course, but I think the second half of the essay really reflects the emotion and conflict of the story, and the first half is a little too ... wordy.