When our parents’ home is no longer home

 

Dad and me, about 1980

Yesterday would have been my dad’s 68th birthday. As I’m horrible with recognizing dates (I can tell you what day somebody’s birthday is, and I can tell you what day today is, but for some reason my brain often does not put those two facts together) I did not register this fact until I logged into Facebook yesterday and saw a birthday reminder in my sidebar. Ouch.

Later, I checked my stats and saw that somebody had found my blog by Googling “the happiest mom” and “my dad died”. Double ouch. While I’m sure the searcher had a good reason for using those particular terms together, seeing them there in black and white was an unwelcome punch in the gut. My dad died.

I haven’t written about my dad here much at all. It’s not because I don’t think about it every other waking minute of the day. I’m just not sure what I could say that wouldn’t sound trite or obvious. And I think it’s also partly because to me, a person’s death itself isn’t the life-stopping tragedy; it’s the fact that the person is still dead six months or a year or ten years later that hurts the most. In spite of what “they” all say, I’ve not found that time heals all wounds, per se. In fact, to me the passage of time illuminates the fact that the person you’ve lost is no longer with you, that they really aren’t coming back, and that every minute that goes by from here on out is one they will have missed. You trade a dull, long ache for that initial sharp, stabbing pain. It’s more bearable, but it’s not a huge improvement.

This month’s theme, home, has got me thinking about my parents even more than usual. Since my parents divorced when I was young and we moved around a lot after that, ‘home’ became less of a physical place and became more about wherever they were. And, as I shared a little about in my post about my mom, without a single home to anchor my childhood, I became pretty attached to some of the furniture and familiar objects that surrounded us.

My stepmother is still living in the house she and my dad moved into about 13 years ago, before I got married. It’s been the site of numerous holidays, birthday parties and get-togethers, and became sort of a surrogate “childhood home” for me even though I was never actually a child there. Last time I visited Brenda, I walked into the kitchen and saw that she’d bought a new kitchen table to replace the table they’d had since they got married two decades ago, that had been the venue for countless breakfasts, dinners, and Scrabble games.

I understand why she did it. The two-decades-old laminate table was seriously dated. She’s surrounded, everywhere she goes, by memories of Dad. She wanted a little bit of a fresh start. Or maybe just a new style. Whatever the reason, I understand…

…except now, I feel like a little bit more of that sense of ‘home’ has been eroded for me. But in reality, that house was never going to be the same anyway. Table or no table, my dad’s gone. And no matter where we sit when we visit-or if Brenda even continues to live there-that sense of a childhood home, tenuous as it was, is gone forever.

I guess this is a part of growing up. Most people don’t lose both parents by their early 30s, but still, part of becoming an adult is making that slow and often painful transfer from a cared-for semi-guest in our parents’ homes, and becoming the mortgage-paying, caretaking, responsible leader in our own. It happens to all of us who start families of our own-some overnight, some in dribs and drabs over decades. But it happens.

Though I’ve had my own family and my own home(s) for about thirteen years, I’m finding that I have to come up with an entirely new, entirely grown-up definition of ‘home’ now that neither of my parents are living. In a way it’s freeing, being a grown-up: we get to create our own traditions. We make our own rules. We choose whether to have turkey or ham or veggie loaf. We decide whether the family convenes around the kitchen table or the living-room sofa. But it’s disorienting, too. As I said to my sister soon after my dad died, with no small amount of amazement and dismay, “Now we’re the grown-ups.”

And that means thinking about how my kids will feel one day when they’re “really the grown-ups,” whether they have that epiphany when they’re thirty or sixty. I hope that, like me, they feel nostalgia and wistfulness about their childhood home, but I also hope that, like me, they feel confident and capable of forging one of their own. And that someday (hopefully soon) I’ll think of my parents’ memory as a centerpiece of the home I’ve created, rather than belonging to a home I’ve left behind for good.

The video below is a slide show my awesome stepbrother Adam made in celebration of my dad’s life. If you care to watch it, please ignore my totally embarrassing high school hair.

Other helpful posts like this:

Newtown, loss, and parenting as though tomorrow will always come overscheduling, outliers, and the Olympics: are parents “pushing” kids to be great? The Kitchen Hour Podcast: Fear math no more. Mom’s birthday matters, too. (Sunday Morning Coffee)