My Mother’s House
At first, it was a “formal” living room, which my mom decorated toward an exotic animal theme. She hung pictures of lions next to pictures of tigers. She outfitted the coffee table with a chess set of ceramic monkeys striking various poses while holding bananas. She arranged two plush leopards to guard the backs of both leather love seats, and tried to throw in a zebra-print rug to tie the whole concept together. The jungle room, as we started calling it, shared a wall with the real living room, the room where we gathered, alone or as a family, and spent 85 percent of our time, mostly watching TV. No one really used the jungle room until my sister hooked up the family computer in there.
I spent a lot of time in the computer room, accidentally downloading viruses onto our ancient ‘95 Compaq desktop, deliberating over which song to place on my MySpace page. Eventually, we got Wi-Fi and laptops and smartphones; the computer room, once again, became another unused space in the house — much like the dining room where we ate exactly zero of our meals and where my dad had given up any semblance of domesticity by placing his 600-pound gun safe in one corner.
Though no one used it, the computer room featured its jungle decor, and that Compaq, for years — from 2001 when we first built the house until 2014, when the room transformed once again.
The love seats came out, along with the leopards and zebra rug. My dad boxed up the Compaq and relegated it to the basement. Then he bought a new television and placed it on the Compaq’s former desk. In the space leftover, he brought in: one hospital bed; one motorized wheelchair; one special lift machine for hoisting someone from wheelchair to bed; two small, three-drawer Tupperware containers filled with sweatpants and medical supplies; and finally, one mother, my mother, for whom this new set-up was necessary.
In the last two years of her life, my mother would rarely leave this room, relying on us — her family and neighbors, nurses and friends — to come to her. This is the room where she eventually died.
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The above is the intro to an essay I’ve started and stopped going on three years now. It’s an elegy to my childhood home as a metaphor for how my family grew and changed within its walls. In essence, it’s an elegy to my family when my mother was still alive and a part of it. See, the house is still owned by my father; he lives in it as of this writing. But it stopped being my home, the place I could always come back to if things became too hard or overwhelming, when my mother died. Of course, as she was dying, it didn’t occur to me that my home was dying, too. I didn’t think of my mother as home until my dad got remarried the year after her death and the house transformed into their home. His wife’s home. They knocked down the wall between living rooms, replaced the carpet with vinyl, simulated-hardwood floors, painted the front door a bright red, moved the laundry and dryer to the basement, converted my siblings’ bedrooms, and my own, into guest rooms, got rid of the downstairs toilet (the only one you could use without climbing a set of stairs to reach it), and filled every room with antique furniture tinged with that barn-wood-as-pantry-door aesthetic.
Objectively, the changes are nice. I especially like the red front door. But I can’t help noticing how every sign of my mother’s life and death in that house has been removed, painted over, or boxed in the basement. Every ramp, stair lift, accessible part of the house erased as if, with my mother and her debilitating illness gone, there are no longer such needs. I can’t help thinking about my maternal grandfather, sitting on his living room couch a month before his death in 2018, lamenting that he’d never put in a bathroom on the first floor of his house. There was a toilet in the basement and a toilet on the second floor — and a steep set of stairs to navigate when he needed to use either one, something that had become daunting to him when cancer began weakening his back and shuffling his steps. What will my dad and his wife do if the flight of stairs in their home were to become, God forbid, insurmountable?
Maybe I just have to accept that it’s not my problem to figure out. It’s not my home, it’s not my life, it’s ultimately not my choice what they decide to do, or not do, remove, or keep as is. Maybe the essay about my mother’s house is so difficult to pin down and finish because my relationship to it, the house, my mother, my father has changed so much — is changing so much — from month to month, year to year. I can only assume it will keep changing. I can only hope that that change is toward a gradual evolution of acceptance and empathy. That sometimes seems like a far-flung, impossible goal — but, well, at least I’m trying.
I miss my mother every day, in a way I never truly anticipated, though I certainly got the chance to experience a lot of anticipatory grief as her health slowly declined. I miss my dad too, as our relationship has seen its fair share of strain since my mother’s death. It’s hard to recognize, as it’s happening, that when the first person to ever love you unconditionally no longer exists in the world, her absence isn’t all-consuming for everyone who feels, or notices, it. What I lost when my mother died is not the same as what my father lost. What we gained through that loss isn’t the same, either.
My dad got a second chance at marriage, a new family, a new home. I don’t want to begrudge him that. I only wish my mother could have gotten her second chance, too.
