Where Home is

There is something in my neighborhood that pierces me whenever I drive past it. It's an empty piece of land where a house recently existed. This home belonged to a couple whose children and grandchildren lived directly across the street. For decades, this wonderful family, whom I know, lived in an idyllic cocoon of love and closeness. The kids ran back and forth to their grandparents, holidays and Shabboses were spent eating together, and downtime meant more hanging out as a whole. This family rolled as one, with many other assorted siblings and their children in the neighborhood too. Every parent's dream.

A few years ago the family patriarch died. I often wondered how painful it would be for their daughter to see her former home, that now just housed just one parent. That due to the physical proximity of their houses, the sight of where her father used to live was unavoidable. Fresh arrows of grief in the heart every time. However, life has a way of demanding that we constantly readjust by catapulting us into unfamiliar territory, so they all continued to live according to their new reality. Same homes, same street, same close bond. Holes from losing a loved one are never filled, we just learn how to navigate ourselves around them.

Then, the matriarch eventually sold her house. Her children sold as well and moved out of town. So now one house is vacant, while the other ten feet away was bought and bulldozed. It is this empty property that fills me with tremendous sadness and discomfort, as well as a little dose of fear. It's such a huge juxtaposition, to see what has become of that little family oasis of theirs. Their corner went from a private bungalow colony to vacancy and non existence. I always think about things like this. The family that lived in my house a hundred years ago, before we knocked down what they had built. The people who will knock down my house eventually, making the decision to do so by quickly writing us off without ever meeting us. It feels so dismissive, even though it's of course entirely not personal. You can't dismiss someone you've never met. All the laughs, fights, memories, and meals made here will become ghosts. Maybe, MAYBE, someone will say, "I knew them", but even that person will be dismissed; the new owner won't care, nor should he really. It's hard to care about those we don't know. How a family can go from existing in one place in time, to simply no longer being there is a harsh reminder of how temporary and fleeting life is. Our utopia that we've created can shift radically as quickly as the earth can crack in a quake. Nothing is permanent. We put so much time and love into maintaining our homes. It's hard to think one day they'll become a pile of demolished bricks. No one will care who your decorator was, and if you liked working with him. Or whether or not you had a pool. My brother in law once told me wisely, to never get too attached to a pile of bricks. This is good advice for obvious reasons. Don't wrap your whole existence up within a certain set of four walls, because one day those walls will be torn down. What you built within that house will move to another location, where it will continue to be. This isn't a post about how what matters is on the inside, it's a sad thought about the crappy passage of time. On the one hand each of us is a significant gift in the world, but on the other hand we are just minor details. It's About how our chapters often write themselves without consulting us first.

Yes, we have power over our own story. But there are things we simply cannot control, which puts us at the mercy of Life. And that is a hard pill to swallow. I can't clean this up and put it in a pretty box. There's no glossing over or filtering these realities. Thinking about it or not is irrelevant. It's happening anyway. All we can do is love and live fiercely in whichever space we are in.