Home Safe
By: Lisa Jeffcoat
Tags: Grief And Loss, Stay At Home, 2020, Well Being, Home

I’ve used less gas, logged fewer steps, and leaned forward to hug not a single person since March. But 2020 has been quite a journey nonetheless: a journey of learning to stay home.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how what I mean when I say home has changed over the course of my life. When I was a kid saying I was going home, I meant to the house where my family lived. Until I was twelve that was my parents, me, sometimes a dog, and one time a single pet ant I managed to keep in one square of a tennis racket for about half an hour. Then my brother was born, and home became a new house big enough for all four of us. I spent a lot of my tween hours rocking and singing my baby brother to sleep in that house, practicing for piano and voice lessons, and learning in its mirrors why cutting your own bangs is always a mistake. I spent many of my teenage hours having crucially important conversations on the landline phone in that house, laughing my way through a family pie fight in the back yard, celebrating birthday surprises, making silly poster collages about church youth group choir trips in my room, and saying goodnight to my boyfriend at the door. That house and my family provided shelter during some of my adult life’s most exciting and most painful transitions; as I made memories there over time the house itself and the love of my family both swirled together into what home felt like for me: the safety, comfort, and belonging of being with the people I love inside the walls that have held us all through the years. I think that feeling is a big part of what so many of us are grieving this holiday season: I will miss closing my eyes on Christmas night in the room I grew up in with the people who have loved me the longest snoring not-at-all quietly down the hall.

As a young adult I remember crying — and of course writing hilariously awful teenage poetry about — the first time I heard myself call my dorm room home on the phone with my mother. I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, but I was grieving the loss of concreteness in my younger understanding of home. I had great roommates in whom I found pieces of what home used to mean. I found a kind of home in the friends I made in my courses and especially in choral ensembles where we breathed, made music, and were silent together. And I was beginning to beginning to build what would become my new home for awhile with the man I would later marry…and even later divorce. But piecing home together in people and experiences didn’t feel quite as safe or comfortable as going home had felt to me as a child. I think this is also a feeling many of us are grieving this year: I miss the ease of having one place that solidly, singularly felt like home. I could map it. GPS could tell me how long it would take to get to that feeling. Looking for those feelings of home during a pandemic where the responsible thing is to stay at our own house or apartment or condo or care facility most of the time compels us to see not just the easy whole, but also the complicated pieces that make up our homes. To use bread, one of the year’s most ubiquitous themes: we’ve spent most of this year in a drawer where the ingredients we’ve each put into our recipe for home are proving themselves in undeniable ways. 2020 has made it hard to look away from the realities of our lives; our relationships; our social structures; and the systems we have built, been harmed by, or benefitted from. And so, held uncomfortably close within the walls we have built, we are indeed feeling stuck at home.

Some of my most valuable lessons about staying at home were ones I learned just a few years ago in midlife by moving 3,000 miles away from the house and people I grew up calling home. I was overwhelmed with a flood of emotions my first night living in California when the locator app my family had used to share in my cross-country journey showed a dot for me by one ocean and a dot for my mom all the way on the other. In that moment I faced a choice between staying present to myself in the flood or finding a way to escape what I was feeling. I’ve made both choices in the many times I’ve faced that decision since. That night I tried to escape myself and my feelings by actually writing the word home in the sand. But it didn’t work. I learned — and continue again and again to keep re-learning — that home is built inside. Home isn’t the houses, the landscapes, or even the people: there’s nothing outside of us that can make us feel at home enough until we cultivate safety, comfort, and a sense of belonging to ourselves. And this year has given us ample opportunities to choose between coming home to ourselves and abandoning who we truly are.

I have thought about that night on the beach in San Francisco many times since my mom died last year: what I wouldn’t give for her to be only 3,000 miles away. The death of the person who was herself my first home has changed how I understand myself in the world in ways I am still unraveling.

What I do know now is that our whole lives are opportunities to take an honest look at the person in the mirror and to create a life that brings a reflection of peace. Ultimately, for me this year has been about practicing staying home to myself. It has been about deciding not to look away no matter how hard things get. To be relentlessly honest with myself about what I need to make right, let go of, hold on to, and reach out for in the world even when it scares me or doesn’t make me look good. It is difficult, exhausting, uncomfortable, humbling work. But creating a life we can live in is worth it. Building a home within that doesn’t wash away with the tide is worth it. Only then can each of us fully enjoy the things that make our houses homes; only then can we truly cherish the people who show us how much they love us by asking us to let them know when we’re home safe.