About Home

You’re thirty-four and you just signed the papers. You’re standing in the empty living room deciding where the couch will go.

I’m writing this from somewhere else. Somewhere fine. Somewhere that makes sense. Smaller, one floor, closer to Sarah. I can see the logic of it. I agreed to the logic of it.

I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’m not sure I know.

The seventh time she brought it up, we were sitting at dinner. She’d made that chicken I like. I understood she was trying to be gentle. I could see how much it cost her to say it again, and I couldn’t give her anything back. I just sat there. I felt my face do something I couldn’t control and I watched her see it and I still couldn’t speak.

What was I supposed to say? That the hallway holds forty years of walking to bed? That my hand knows the banister in the dark? That your mother is still in the bedroom, not her ghost, her, the way she reached for the lamp, the particular angle she liked the blinds?

I couldn’t say any of that. It would have sounded like I was losing my mind. I wasn’t losing my mind. I was losing the place that held the life, and I didn’t have language for what that meant.

I delayed. For a while I thought I could hold on. The stairs got harder. The yard got away from me. I stayed anyway, until staying became its own kind of cruelty, to Sarah, to myself, to the house that deserved better than my failing to keep up with it.

Here’s what I want to tell you, standing in that empty living room:

You are right to love it. You are right that it will matter. The counter will wear down where your hand rests waiting for the coffee. The maple in the backyard will get enormous and every fall it will stop you cold. Pay attention. Let it accumulate. That’s not the mistake.

I don’t know what the mistake is. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe it’s just loss, the kind that comes for everyone, and no amount of preparing makes it easier.

When they sit across the table and bring it up for the seventh time, try to remember: they cannot see what you see when you look at the walls. They love you. They’re terrified. Moving is the only language they have for keeping you safe.

Be patient with them.

And if one day you find yourself in a new place, somewhere fine, somewhere that makes sense, and you still feel the old hallway under your feet when you close your eyes, know that I felt it too.

Maybe you’ll miss it less than I did. Maybe you won’t write a letter.

But if you do, and if someone younger reads it, tell them: it’s not the house. It’s the life that soaked into it. And when you leave, you leave some of yourself in the walls, and there’s no going back to collect it.

I don’t know if that’s something you can prepare for.

I couldn’t.