Our family is still working through the aftermath of my father’s death.  It’s not that the passing was more traumatic than it needed to be; in many ways, quite the contrary.  But it means a definite turning of the page, entering a new and uncertain chapter.  We know how we want the story to come out, and we’re doing our best in accordance with that plot.  It’s just that we don’t have that much control.

In the days before and after Dad died, pretty much everyone in the family put their heads down and pushed forward.  We did what needed to be done.  With my other responsibilities, I didn’t allow myself much room for reflection, just duty.  I knew in my mind that things were changing.  How could I not know?  But it’s all been step-by-step, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other.  Don’t look up, just focus on making progress.

One of those steps has been to move my mother into an assisted-living facility.  It’s a wonderful place, bright and cheery, with an inordinately helpful and caring staff.  We thought it might take Mom a long time to get used to the idea of moving.  We didn’t push.  But she made the decision from the first time we brought her there.  She knew, as did we all, that it was the best option, and she wanted to do the right thing.

But as the day approached, her ambivalence grew.  She began to dread the move.  And when it came down to it, even she was taken aback by how difficult the transition actually was.  All her life, she had been one to decide that she would feel a certain way and it would be so.  Not anymore.

The rest of us knew it would be hard, and had tried to be both realistic and encouraging.  We tried to ease into the transition gradually: talking in advance about what she would do when she got there; planning what furniture to take and where it would go; moving the furniture on one day; moving her in personally a couple of days later.

Yet even with that gentle lead-in, the day she moved seemed to slam a door behind her.  The first night was nearly unbearable.  It’s been not quite a week now, and the situation is improving, slowly.  We know that it will take time.  But the new apartment isn’t home, not yet.  One of the other residents told her quite unambiguously that it never would be.  That wasn’t meant to be a complaint, just sober realism.

My wife and I were with her that first night.  We knew we had to leave her to herself at some point to face the new situation alone.  And we still had some errands to do at the old house.

For me, that’s when it all finally began to sink in.  The house felt alien.  Some of the furniture was gone; some remained.  There were marks on the carpet where furniture had sat for years.  Here and there, corners of the house were in disarray.  Dad wasn’t there, and now, neither was Mom.  That part of life was irretrievably gone.  Something in the house had been hollowed out, and the hollowness echoed inside me.  It still does.

It’s strange to think about how much time and energy goes into making a house a home, a place of refuge, a place where our hearts can be at ease.  When things are going well, we don’t notice the fragility of it all.  Then change comes, something or somebody is lost, and the spell is broken.  It’s not home anymore.  And even if we try to make another home, somewhere else, we may find that we can no longer be innocent of our illusions in quite the same way.

In his Confessions, Augustine praises God: “you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”  In that famous saying, he points us the way home.  Paul, too, in describing the Christian life as one of groaning (Rom 8:22-27; 2 Cor 5:2-4), suggests that we will never be completely comfortable in this life, as long as we live in these mortal bodies.

That’s not to say that we can’t make our homes places of joy.  But it’s a sober joy because it knows that it is derivative of the rest that can only be found in God.  Our earthly homes will never be more than a shadow of our heavenly home.  A pleasant shadow, a joyous shadow, one for which we should be zealous and grateful–yes, yes, and yes.  But a shadow nonetheless, which at its best, redirects us to the Light.