House & Soul

I walk around my house at night comfortable with the darkness, knowing it's path so well I have no need to turn on any lights. I know each room like a still picture inside my head, know precisely where everything is in every room from the desk pressed against the wall here, a lamp on a table there, to the cats curled up asleep on the chair they wouldn't dare to be caught on during the daylight hours. This is the comfort of home. This knowing of a space that over time becomes an extension of yourself, as much a part of you as your heart and your hands. This is the thought I've been grappling with, trying to find the right words to explain this feeling I've had over being part of and witnessing the separation of house and soul.

I wonder on that last night my Grandmother spent sleeping in my Uncle's old room in her tiny little house tucked back safely from the road, if she really understood that it was to be her last night sleeping there. I wonder if she (like me) would have stayed awake just to listen once more to all those familiar sounds, those nighttime sounds she's heard for well over the past 30 something years like her own personal lullaby... I think she knew but didn't want to know, probably crying herself to sleep in the darkness that night preparing herself for the morning ahead when she would wake and attempt to not show fear.

I admire her courage to let it go. To trust in her grown children to have her best interest at heart. To walk out that morning for the last time and face the day with strength and pride when what I'm sure she really wanted to do was stage a protest, sit in her favorite rocker and never leave. She may have even handled it far better than my Mother or myself who could barely contain our tears and even our tempers when the strain of everything began to be too much. She only cried once that I'm aware of as I was driving her to her new home at the assisted living community, my Uncle and my Mother following in a separate car. She took my hand and held it tight, looking at me with tears in her eyes as if she was a lost child and I was her only connection to the world. "I'll go," she said. "Because it's what they want me to do." And then she made me promise not to tell anyone that she'd been crying. A promise I only agreed to once she promised not to tell anyone that I had too.

I don't expect my Grams will stop missing her home anytime soon. I don't expect that her new "home" will ever quite compare. But what I hope is that she will come to like it enough that all her memories of home will bring comfort and joy.