this place that loves me well

on grief in the anticipation of change

This piece, like my love letter to a nursing mother a few months ago, is very different from my usual style, but it reflects deeply on an ache that my heart has been feeling—and dreading—for months and years: moving. We did the actual moving this past weekend, but I wrote this piece quite some time ago, before we knew for sure that the moving would really be happening. I hope you find something in it that speaks to the longing for home in your own heart.

Photo by Amanda Vick on Unsplash

It wasn’t even on our radar, this place that loves us well.

I biked past it as a teenager, on my way to the store or just out for a ride.

It was “sketchy” and “those apartments by the Walmart”—you know the ones.

And yet, when we needed an open door, this was the door the Lord opened. First floor. Two bedrooms. One bath. Laminate floors. A crepe myrtle outside, blossoming like fireworks in the late summer sun. Right along the fence line in a corner of the complex that is always quiet and safe.

We landed softly, held by the strong hands that carried our furniture over the threshold when my body, swollen and still swelling at nine months pregnant in the sweltering summer heat, could barely stand for long enough to sweep. Welcomed by friends two buildings over, by family a two-minute drive away. Nurtured physically by the grocery store across the street and spiritually by the perpetual adoration chapel just down the road. Socialized in the park and the pool just a few blocks away.

This place loves us so well.

Our last neighbor would play music at all hours of the day and night, the bass thrumming through our walls. Never quite loud enough to keep us awake, but never quiet enough that you could brush your teeth without noticing it.

Our neighbor here prays the rosary each evening, the sweet repeated words drifting across our shared wall, calling us to prayer. Our wider community knows us, has affection for us, misses us when circumstances don’t align for a chance encounter in the parking lot.

They’ll miss us when we’re gone.

Here we welcomed our children home, held them close, filled their tummies and stroked their heads. Soothed booboos and meltdowns. First smiles and first teeth and first foods and first words and first steps. I hate to think of the lasts. I cannot bring myself to say ‘goodbye’, even just in my imagination.

I wonder, sometimes, how much this place has shaped our family. If we’d lived in our old carpeted home, would we have been so daring with diaper-free time?¹ If we’d had a yard, would we still have joined our park group? If we didn’t live in walking distance to the chapel, would our daughter still insist on going to visit Him in the Little Church? How often would I have melted down an hour before dinnertime because I’d forgotten a key ingredient, weeping as I loaded the girls into the car or scrambled to come up with an alternate meal?

This place loves us so well.

This is the home where I was told—amidst the wailing of my children and the clutter of a life well-loved—that my family has a special charism for hospitality in the thick of things, welcoming one and all into our very selves, as we are, wailing and messy and smiling through yawns.

Yet even now, I feel the detaching begin. I know how this goes, and I dread it, and I long for it. I could not leave now. I only pray I will be able to when the time comes.

What I love about this place is its eternal sameness—we are one of a handful of families dwelling among the elderly and the alone. The divorced Jewish woman and her poodle. The never-married and the widowed. The childless and the grandparents and the not-yet-married. The endless supply of gray tabby cats.

This place loves them so well.²

One by one, whether in the past or in the future, all the close connections that tie us to this place are slowly slipping away. Friends, family, jobs—these will not last, not in this season of perpetual growth and change and motion.

But the elderly? The alone? The divorced and widowed and never-married? Here they are and here they will remain.

That rosary-wielding neighbor, the one who came with us to Mass and rejoiced to see an altar rail installed instead of removed? She told me this week that she’s been here for twenty-five years. For almost as long as I’ve been alive, she’s been living here, praying, growing, thriving, aging. Her sister—who we also know and call by name, who has called us in moments of fear or sorrow—tells me that my neighbor is, indeed, a living saint. That those rosaries drew her back to the church and back to the heart of Christ. I rest, awe-struck and grateful, in the certainty that those rosaries are sometimes offered for me. They predate our time here and they will continue, God-willing, for many years after we leave, until our dear neighbor’s work is done and she is welcomed to our heavenly home.

This place would not be enough to sustain us, if all else failed, but it is enough to grieve while all else holds its tentative and transient truce. The clock ticks towards the day when grandparents will move away, when new children will call our friends further into the suburbs, when new vocations and new Vocations will unravel the threads with which we currently weave our social lives.

This place, I have to assume, cannot love us well forever.

And, it is true, my heart craves more. My heart craves grass and new paint on the walls and space for more children if the Lord so chooses. But my heart also craves permanence and consistency and the deeply-grounding experience of being seen and known. My heart craves proximity to loved ones, neighbor-friends for my children, and the promise of solace for this mother’s heart in the ever-beating, ever-waiting Heart of Christ.³

Should He ever open to us the door of a home to call our own, will we find there what we lose in leaving here? Will we find a place where everything we need can be accessed without a car, if we so choose? Will we find family, friends, neighbors with whom we can live in that delightful and uncomfortable imbalance of debt?⁴ Will we find slides and swings and swimming pools? Food and festivals and fair weather?

Will we find a place that loves us oh so well?

I find it difficult to believe. I know I will miss this place.⁵ Here within these walls is the illusion of permanence, of stability, of community.

Is it an illusion? Or do I merely treat it as one because I know, someplace deep in my bones, that this home is simply a layover for us?

What is life, if not a layover? The world, after all, is our ship and not our home.

So maybe the past isn’t what I’m truly missing
Maybe I’m missing what’s to come
Or maybe eternity has already begun⁶

Is there something in this ache, this longing, this grief that can point me to heaven? I know there must be. I know that there is no place on God’s green earth that can fully satisfy my heart, that these longings and grievings must be signposts. I hope that if I follow them faithfully, one day I will find myself among the angels and saints, all desires fulfilled.

I hope that when I die, I can say with Psyche that “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — […] the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home?”⁷

This place is not my final home, but it is a home. This place has loved me well.

For now, as we anticipate the ever-increasing likelihood of being among the first to leave this place, instead of among the last, we grieve.

And for now, it is enough.

What does the longing for home look like in your life? What other longings and griefs is the Lord using to draw your heart back to His?

1. Diaper-free time being, if you weren’t here when this post was shared, one of the most formative experiences of my motherhood.

2. While we were not living here during hurricane Harvey in 2017, this place—less than half a mile from the bayou that vastly overflowed its banks—did not flood.

3. I joke about starting a homesteading commune, but only because really opening up about how deeply I desire it would be to open myself up to inevitable disappointment. Such, I tell myself, is life in the post-modern West. An endless longing for deep roots that we cannot will into existence in our past and cannot singlehandedly create for our children.

4. I’ve been referencing a lot of

Leah Libresco Sargeant

in my drafts lately, and this post is no exception. Her essay “The Intimacy of Imbalance” has remained with me for months:

It is the reality of need that creates relationships, whether they are as abstract as a signed-over check or as intimate as a child helping their parent turn over to prevent bedsores… In community, the bonds of need and debt ebb and flow, rarely coming to a conclusion.

Living next to an older, single, carless adult has been a profound lesson in this intimate imbalance—she needs a ride to Mass one weekend, the next week I need someone to sit with the sleeping baby while I run out to run an errand. She purchased a little stuffy for our toddler during her shopping trip, a few weeks later we help her bring some heavy packages inside. Remaining in debt to one another—and the inevitable conversations these moments entail—has built a bond between us unlike anything that could have existed when we lived beside other “independent” adults.

5. The quote from the piece that inspired these thoughts. Thanks

Lore Wilbert

for your honesty, which allowed me to acknowledge that grief and growth can coexist, and that we can miss a place in anticipation, even as we do our best to treasure each uncertain remaining day.

6. Lyrics from “The Return” by John Lucas:

7. Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, quote accessed here.