home

I think grief is layered.

When I first met grief, it felt like survival. Heavy, confusing, survival.

The ‘here and now’s’ were so amplified in order to survive. I could only tackle the task right in front of me. The one at my feet at that very moment.

The more time that passes, the more layers I seem to unveil.

It has become less about the task at my feet and more about the legacy, the life, above my head - all around me.

The big blanket themes of life constantly floating around my body, ready to be analysed in this new, different ‘with grief’ world.

As the fog of the ‘here and now’ begins to lift, I am left with questions that don’t have answers.

After the fog, I met home.

Home is complex.

Home was mother for me for so long that I struggle to digest how I exist in a world without the woman that brought me into it.

I have lived in 15 houses in my life. I have moved around, adapted, absorbed and experienced so many places and how they have all impacted me, in order to learn that my sense of home wasn’t created from the walls of the houses I lived in. It was created by her.

It was turning a key in the front door knowing she would be there on the other side of it.

It was kitchen bench conversations over a stove top.

It was a lifetime of what could be considered small everyday things that had developed this sense of belonging inside me. It was a sense of knowing, and magic, and comfort and security.

I opened the front door of my new apartment 5 days before my mum passed away.

I sat in the middle of it and exhaled a sense of hope - that this would be my place now, that home would be what I created it to be. I was quickly jolted into the reality that, without a sense of home you can live in a house without quite creating a home. 

In the ‘here and now’ stage of grief I didn’t have the space to examine the impact of losing what I considered home to be.

But in the ‘living with grief’ place I have entered there is all this space and time to consider home. I felt its absence so deeply, and as I desperately tried to savour every last piece of it in the form of her, I finally had to surrender to not understanding it at all, anymore.

Home has become the moments that make me feel like I am home.
It isn’t a person anymore, but a soul glow. A feeling of soft relief.

I took a stocktake of all the ways home showed up for me this year, and it was tangled through everything, all of it.

Home felt like my best friend turning up to the hospital with everything I needed, without me having to ask.

Home felt like people showing up to sit in silence with me. 

Home feels like hearing my sister's voice on the other side of the phone. 

Home feels like a hug from my dad.

My mum taught me the feeling of home. She gave me 26 years of establishing the soul glow within myself, to see those moments for how precious they are, and when the grief fog lifted it allowed me to see that all this time home was everywhere.

It was in the moments of life that felt like alignment and belonging.

She taught me the feeling of home, without ever knowing I would ultimately become my own.

I am home.

Home is a gift grief gave me, for without it, I may have just kept living with the belief that it was outside of me this whole time. A flame of freedom developed when this all became clear, for now no one can take that glow she gave me.