Finding Home, within and without

I’m sitting in the same room where I used to do my homework twenty years ago, though the table is in a different place, and whilst almost everything else looks the same, nothing feels the same.

We’ve lived in my parental home for almost a year now. In my dad’s house, as I still think of it. It’s not his anymore —dad is gone, as is mum—, but his fingerprints are still all over it: in the floors he laid, the walls he painted, the trees he planted. But his half-empty coffee cup no longer sits on the table, his reading glasses don’t lay scattered throughout the house, and his shoes no longer stand by the door, ready to support him on another 20km walk. It might be our house, but it still feels like his home.

Home. Thinking back, I realise it’s been a central theme in my life—something I’ve searched for, longed for, built, lost, and rebuilt again. It’s at the core of my work, the feeling that I seek in nearly everything I do. I found it once. And then again two years ago, passenger-princessing over the narrow, winding roads of the Yorkshire Dales.

It’s been almost two years since that trip and I still find my mind conjuring up the rolling hills and endless stone walls dividing up the land like veins when I’m out with our pup in what I’ll kindly call ‘less inspiring environments’. I’ve never understood people’s desire to visit the Netherlands. If you ask me, it’s just not it. That has been my unwavering sentiment since I was 15 and first decided I wanted to leave. Move. Get the hell outta here. It took two more years, but then to London I went. And that felt like home. Continued to feel like home for over a decade after I’d moved back ‘home’ here.

“So why did you drop out of Yale London?!”

Well. I got to choose between life and death — and I chose death. My mum’s death. And to be there for it.

Mum had gone into hospital with a suspected lung infection. It was unlike mum (she was barely ever ill and never anything severe), but then so was her burnout. I guess she decided the shake up the whole midlife crisis thing. Dubious move. So anyway, hospital it was. Where they soon discovered an infection would have been good news. Mum had cancer. Lung cancer. Terminal. Untreatable. About a year to live.

Mum was 47.

She died at 48.

In those nine months between our world breaking and it fully imploding, I somehow managed to pass my last London-based exams, pack up my bags, leave even more bags behind, re-enroll in uni, and move back in with my parents. Back home, in every sense but my felt sense. Home was London. Home was the pub after lectures, Sunday morning walks along the Thames until I found a cosy corner and a steaming mug of milky tea to read my book. Not.. this.

Even as my parental home, the house felt unrecognisable. That home was where dad was always in, mum was out working or upstairs studying, and the two of them would stand in the kitchen at 9pm, nursing glasses of red wine while mum vented about office frustrations and dad listened, offering his quiet support. Not this strange place where mum would bake apple pies on a random Tuesday morning or was now incapable of eating the foods that had been her favourite for 47 years. This wasn’t home in any sense. This was Mars. It felt alien. Some strange alternate universe my plane had somehow landed in.

Mum died January 7th, 2012. I was 20, she would forever be 48 and whilst everyone was busy new year’s resoluting, I couldn’t for the life of me remember why we hadn’t watched the fireworks together last week. She’d been on the top floor of the hospital — best views in town. How could there have been a place I’d rather been? It was the first of many things that wouldn’t make sense.

Mum died and with her much of me did, too. I breathed, I moved (to Amsterdam), studied and graduated, rolled into my first three jobs, overcame my eating disorder without knowing how, bought a house, still didn’t feel at home, and at 29 walked into therapy, sat down on a pink velvet-y couch and said “I don’t think I know who I am anymore.”.

Not where I’d thought I’d be at 29.

I didn’t just feel confused. I felt lost and ashamed. What 29-year-old doesn’t know who they are? I felt it was the very least of what I should have figured out. I’d lived with grief for nearly a third of my life and I was over it. Done with it. I wanted to just live already. But the truth was that I had only just begun to truly grieve. Only just started to realise that losing my mum had affected every part of my life. That between losing her to death, myself to anorexia, and my dad to grief, the very foundation of my inner sense of home had been shattered. Rebuilding that sense would take time, patience and work.

One thing you should know about me: I have no patience. Zero. None. But I had time, and I could work and so naturally, I went headfirst into therapy and a quest for all things self. I self-developed, explored, found, rejected, embraced and ultimately found something that began to resemble home. In the world, in my life, in myself.

And then dad died. Because life loves a plot twist.
But that’s a story for another day.

I thought of ending this piece on a few things I’ve learned about finding or creating that sense of home over the years, but the truth is that I don’t have any profound wisdom. Perhaps home isn’t a single, final place we arrive at, but something we keep stitching together. A patchwork blanket of places, faces, moments and sounds that settle our minds and soothe our hearts.

I still haven’t fully found home, but I know that for now, it includes a trusty book, snoring puppy, muddy boots, crackling fires and full-belly laughter.

And maybe for now, that’s enough.