You Can Go Home Again

substituting his presence for my own

I’ve started dismantling my house in an attempt to make it new again. For four years, it was “our house,” a place where we lived and loved together. It belonged to my grandparents first, built with my grandfather’s own hands, then when they passed away it became property of my father and my aunt. We moved into a basement apartment in the house and lived there for a few years before we bought it and lugged all of our stuff upstairs and vowed to make this house a home.

We decorated and rearranged, we painted and put up molding, we bought new furniture. At some point it became ours, and not just a place where my grandparents used to live, where I used to play. It became home before it became a prison during the pandemic, when our relationship fell apart.

I’ve lived for over a year in a home that has his fingerprints everywhere. I realize now that the decorating was all him, that all the stuff hanging on the walls, all the furniture choices, all the knick knacks and little touches were all his doing, that I was just along for the ride. So the past year became a ritual of waking up in a house that still felt like him, where his ghost still presided. Sometimes it made me sad, sometimes it comforted me, made me feel like he was still around. And then one day I woke up mad. I was angry that I had to spend yet another day navigating my way around a home that held memories I wanted to let go of. This house was mine now, I went through the hell of refinancing to get his name off the deed. Why should I let all his personal touches still linger, let his personality linger in the place where I lived without him?

So I made plans. I thought about all the ways I could make it different, make it mine. I started small, getting rid of some of the fake plants he had scattered around the house, just ceremoniously dumping them in the garbage. I took down some art that was in my bedroom that belonged to him. I changed the bedding to something bright and flowery. I started small, but each step felt significant, like I was finally moving on.

I bought a new coffee table and a throw rug to go underneath it. I sold the old coffee table and an indoor chaise lounge that was in the reading room to some total strangers who didn’t know they were taking a year of mourning off of my hands. Emboldened, I got rid of the small kitchen table we rarely ate on and put in a nook with benches that looks lovely. I ordered a lovely print (above) for the living room wall above the couch. I will take down his Picasso prints and give them to my sister. Then I will proceed to take down the framed movie posters and replace them with prints of my daughter’s photography and some of my own.

While this all seems so superficial, it’s not. Redoing the house has mended my heart. I wake up and think of what I can do next instead of dreading looking at his stuff. I feel more at home, less like I’m living in a museum of a failed relationship. I am slowly erasing his presence, and that’s ok. For a while I wanted to keep it here, because I missed him so much. I wanted to feel like he was around. But the longer I was alone, the less I missed him, and the less I wanted to feel him around me.

It’s all so necessary for moving on. I have every right to want to feel like my house is my home, that it represents me and not what we used to be, what I used to be. I used to be a wife. I used to be loved. I used to be happy to live among all his stuff. Now I am just me again, not a wife, not a lover, not content to to be no one, though. I want to surround myself with nice things, with beauty, with comfort. And that can only come if I am healing. A little redecorating is sure going a long way.