Dear Cary,
It’s been over a year since I moved from my childhood home. It’s been sold–the only home I knew for 20 years.
Before I left, I read your advice column on letting go of your childhood home. It helped, and I did sit on my porch, and I wrote a letter and placed in a box and buried it under my old swing set.
The excitement of moving into the city has surely passed and every few months I find myself taking a drive out to see my old home. I just can’t seem to wrap my mind around the idea that it’s not really my family’s anymore. Every time I drive by and see the gate shut, the thought that some other strange family lives in there saddens and confuses me terribly. The fact that I can’t drive in and run up my stairs into my bedroom anymore haunts me. I thought that by now I’d hardly think of my home and be over it and have moved on, but I still miss it so much. I just don’t know how to officially move past this grieving process and truly let it go.
Missing My Home
Dear Missing My Home,
The last line of that column you mention was, “And then let it go.” I think that’s the part you’re stuck on now. In that column from August of 2010 (only 8 months after my cancer surgery, which means my brain was still a little scrambled) I invented some clever rituals, and that was nice and poetic. But I also meant to say that there is a moment at the end where one truly lets go of the house. Continuing to drive by it and think about it is not letting it go. Every time you drive by you bring to mind all those feelings and make them fresh and new and vivid. It’s time to stop driving by it every few months.
But driving by it is a bittersweet pleasure, too, isn’t it? So it’s not easy to stop doing that. It means accepting the absence.
I wish I could fix this but I can’t. All I can do is say Yes, I know how gut-wrenching it can be. I know how thoughts of what has been lost can obliterate everything else. All I can do is seek peace within myself, and that means searching for ways to stop obsessing about things that I have lost. How I do that is by reading poetry and sitting still. How I do that is by asking other people, How do you do it? How do you get through a day? How do you live with loss? How do you not break down and fall to your knees? How, when you are filled with grief and rage, do you resist the impulse to do something rash and stupid and destructive but very satisfying and attractive?
I keep asking and I keep getting answers from poets, from therapists, from addicts, from novelists, from my wife, from people who write to me. And the one lesson that stands out is this: The task of being fully human is our major task. It is more important than earning money and maintaining a reputation and giving proper greetings and being on time and polite and staying in our lane when we drive and waving to neighbors and thanking cashiers.
Our major task is the simple task of being fully human. That means accepting that in this moment, right here, right now, we are not the suffering and the anguish, we are not the loss of a house, we are not the memories of family, we are not the unfortunate real estate transactions and lost investments and bungled business ideas and erratic moves that characterize our lives. We are just specks of light illuminating a small section of darkness. We are just points of awareness in a vast and majestic universe.
If I can hold that thought even for a second or two I can be OK. I am not my pajamas. I am not my trench coat. I am not my hands or my computer or my losses or wishes or the airplane flying overhead or my feelings or my former drunkenness or my rage at not getting what I think I deserve, or my sadness at the things my father wanted and never got, or the tragically shortened lives of my dogs, or my vast need for recognition and acknowledgment. If I can know for just an instant that I am not any of that, that I am not my sadness at the loss of a family home or my worries about how my family will live in the future or my anticipated grief at the coming death of a dear friend, then I can get up and keep living, and I can make my appointments and I can comfort my wife and I can see my friend for lunch and I can keep working on the novel and I can even ignore the maddening thunk of a child practicing a barely-in-tune piano next door.
And that — especially the last part — is a miracle.
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I am right in the midst today of literally having everything moved out of my childhood home, the place I lived until leaving for college and that I’ve always come back to since then. Although I have lived in several other places since college, my parents’ home in which I grew up was always the one place that truly felt like “home.” This house has been “home” for me for 42 years. The house definitely changed when my mother passed away 15 years ago and changed even more when my father died 2 years ago. For the past 3 or 4 years, he’d been having an increasingly hard time managing on his own. My husband and I recently purchased our own home about 1,000 miles away, and we have not lived close enough to the house to easily maintain it. We have done so with some effort, but it has not felt like a feasible long-term arrangement. With plans to hand the house over to new buyers in a couple of days, I have been wracked with confusion and sadness, second-guessing the decision to sell and shedding lots of tears.
I have been coping by telling myself that such a great house deserves a family that can live in it full-time, giving full attention to all maintenance needs big or small. I have been searching numerous websites for help in dealing with the grief over giving up the house, and the posts here have been the most helpful I’ve read.
I will choose to focus on and appreciate all of the wonderful memories of bedtime stories, Christmas celebrations, backyard barbecues, family game nights, and just quiet times with those I’ve loved most in this world. I will focus on trying to create equally wonderful memories for my own son in our new home, recognizing that the house is just bricks and mortar. The memories of “home” come from the love of the people in it — and the memories will be with me always.
Count your blessings. You have happy memories associated with your childhood home. There are those who do not. There are those whose stomachs churn if they have to drive anywhere within a 20-block radius of the old homestead.
So, however strange this may sound, *enjoy* your nostalgic sadness. Appreciate the pain of your loss. Believe me, the other kind of wound is worse.
What a beautiful answer, Cary. Exactly what I needed to read today without realizing it. LW, time will help with that awful feeling. I moved 14 times by the time I was 12, and you’d think I would have gotten used to letting go of a house, but it was and is still hard sometimes. It gets better. Good luck.
I totally get where the writer is coming from. My parents sold my childhood home years ago- with good reason- and moved into a house that feels like a Holiday Inn with our furniture in it. It’s been 20 years, but I still miss going “home” to my parents’ house. But really, what I miss is not the house. I miss my parents seeming like the adults in the relationship, I miss my grandparents’ monthly visits. I miss picking oranges off the trees in the backyard; I miss being greeting by our two dogs. All of these people, pets and relationships are gone. And the house won’t bring them back.
Remember, even if you could “go home again” it would not be the same home. Even if you bought the house and moved back in, it would not be your childhood again. You would not be in there playing with your Lincoln logs and your video games, running in the yard with your little friends….
Your childhood home is just a memory. Even those of us who have a parent still living in the childhood home, going to visit there is not a return to a former time… I visit my mother and she is not the mother of my childhood. She is a lovely elderly lady with a number of health problems, who has adapted my childhood home with lots of handles and grab bars and lives a quiet life there. But it is not my childhood home.
My childhood home lives in my memory and in my heart. And so does yours. You can visit it there anytime.
“My childhood home lives in my memory and in my heart. and so does yours. And you can visit it there anytime.”
So beautifully worded. Thank you for the response.
Almost everyone has a home like this that they have loved and moved on from. We do grieve, but then we do move on, because we have no other choice.
I recently went back to visit my hometown, and took a drive by an old childhood home. I expected it to be emotional, but was surprised by the intensity of the nostalgia. Of course I wished I could just knock on the door and walk back in to the life I once lived there.
I imagine it’s the closest thing to what being in a time machine would be like, but even though you get the sensation of going back in time, the reality is that you are still in the present day, and new people with different kids and different pets and different furniture and a different car live in what is really their home now.
I knew I had to sheepishly drive away when I got more than one puzzled glance from the window, and go back to my real home, in a completely different place. It is indeed true that “You can’t go home again.”
A house is just a house. “Home” is where you and the people you love are to be found.
The LW is fortunate to have a place that holds so many happy memories. I hope she has been able to savour the memory of the old home, and start building a new home for the next phase of her life.