Interlude: The House
I spent the last weekend at the old home grounds, my first time there since my mother's funeral. My mom's birthday would've been this Monday just gone, so my sisters and I decided to get together to honour her memory - but also to make the start of the daunting task of clearing the house.
Our family house is more than just a building. My parents bought it in the mid-70s - before then, it was held by one of my mother's relatives so you can comfortably say it's been in the family ownership for a lot longer than that. In every nook and cranny you can witness memories of so many lives lived: photographs of relatives from one decade to another on the walls, memorabilia brought back from countless travels all around the world by our well-journeyed family, shelves full of books and music and films reflecting the changing tastes of everyone who's ever lived in that house. And all those extend way beyond just our core family. Our family has travelled and spread so far over the years (to wit, I live in the UK, one of my sisters elsewhere in Europe and another in the other end of the country to where the house stands), but our family home has always acted as the anchoring point for all of us - the lighthouse guiding not just us but all our distant relatives and our friends to a place they can always call home as well. Our family home was the connecting hub for every strand in our family tree, and in that role it also acted as the center of so many important moments in many people's lives. Within its walls and in its garden we've celebrated christenings, graduations, weddings, and funerals - including my parents'. For myself and my fellow expatriate sister, the house had also been a physical representation of our roots: if we ever felt homesick, if we ever felt like we simply didn't belong where we had settled down and needed to remind ourselves of where we came from, we knew where to journey.
But though the house still stands and is still so unchanged in so many ways, it is now missing its beating heart.
We, realistically speaking, cannot keep the house. None of us can uplift our lives and make a radical move. While keeping the house vacant as a 'holiday' home is tempting, an old house that big needs someone to live in it in order to keep it maintained, and none of us want to see the place fall into ruin. There are also running costs to consider, and we're not rich enough to sustain those forever. Renting it out means we cannot easily visit it, which would nullify the point of keeping it in the first place. We cannot find the strength in our hearts to sell it, but we all know it's the only real choice we have unless some sort of random surprise twist occurs.
But first we need to clear it. The decades of lives richly lived within the house means it's full of beloved collections now without an owner, drawers full of miscellanea that needs to be sorted between those that matter and junk that was forgotten for years behind all the other items, and all the everyday accoutrement from several shelves of cups to wardrobes filled with beloved everyday clothing, fancy dresses we remember from special occasions and jewellery telling its own story of our family history. My sisters and I spent an extended weekend in the house with minimal distractions and only ended up mostly clearing one room; it is going to take so much longer to fully empty it, and we've not even tackled some of the most difficult parts of the inventory yet. This will take time, and each step we'll be tearing off the same emotional band-aids over and over again.
We have however decided to spend the next Christmas at the house. Christmas has always held a big meaning in our family, especially as we all found ourselves living far away: it was the one time of the year when we would consistently be together, enjoy reliving our plethora of family traditions and passing it down to the next generation, who now cannot imagine Christmas without spending it at their grandparents' home. It is going to be a surreal, strange Christmas without our mother there conducting the proceedings and filling every room with warmth and love, and though we will try our best to fill the gap it will not be the same and we all know it. But it is important for all of us to try, just this one (likely) last time.
We are all still dealing with the grief and loss, and right now the house that means so much to us feels like the physical manifestation of it, looming uneasily over our heads.