I’ve always struggled to decide when something was my “favorite,” whether a favorite color or season or day of the week. I think “favorites” of anything are built from memory – words and images and sounds that once evoked strong emotion. Over time, that emotion is captured like river stones in a sifter. Eventually you forget the place, the circumstance, or the dirt and dying leaves and the water that carried them. You are left only with pieces of nameless treasure. 

Those memories and feelings go to live at an address inside of you that is so distant, the road so winding and layered, you forget the way to them. A place too distant to receive an eviction notice. You can no longer remember why this song makes you cry or why the smell of a coffee-stained sweater makes you smile, but it always does. 

My parents built a home on a hill in West Virginia, and for the whole of my life, it was the physical manifestation of favorite. The specifics of ten thousand memories had long faded, but the river stone remained. If I could sit at the hearth tomorrow, my back warmed by the fire, I wouldn’t be able to exactly recall the conversations had or the books read there, but I know precisely what I would feel. The emotional warmth and security. The peace.

Two years ago, that home prompted the beginning of the Dear Life blog, and as of a few weeks ago, that home is gone. Sold to a stranger. I can never return there. 

I’ve been told my entire life that I’m too sentimental, that I spend too much time looking over my shoulder rather than watching for the next step in front of me. In some ways, it’s a weakness and contributes to my clumsiness. In other ways, I wouldn’t choose to change. 

As a child starting a new school year, I would have to return to the old classroom, poke my head inside, and say goodbye before I could move on to my new classroom. In college, I cried standing in my dorm room for the final time. Once Tommy’s family sold a car without letting me say goodbye first, and I responded as if they’d sold off my prized piano books. 

I think my struggle to let go stems from a desperate need to wring life out of every season. I’m scared to just fly by, ready for the next moment, and fail to understand this one. Fail to grasp all the implications, the purpose, the reasons.

As humans grow older, we lose more and more. I don’t mean hair and teeth. I mean the things we love. People, relationships, jobs, homes. No matter how old you are when you first experience the finality of death or the ache of grief, it changes you. You realize how precious the moments are, the people, the memories. You begin to clutch the river stones a little tighter in your palm, look down at them more often. Because remembering is knowing. 

Knowing you were created.

Knowing you’ve loved and been loved. 

Knowing you’ve really lived. 

I struggle to say goodbye to my parent’s house even though I’m aware that it’s a purely physical place, nothing more than brick and wood. But I believed it to be my river stone. The token in my hand, my portal to the piano room. Endless music. One sister singing and the other accompanying.  

My parents’ bedroom. Jumping up onto the bed on Christmas morning.

The kitchen. Mom pulling a roast from the oven. Her open Bible on the kitchen table. Her little “office desk” filled with hand-written reminders to send cards and run errands.

My bedroom. Writing my first novel at the window. 

The living room and fireplace. Lord of the Rings marathons. Nestled in Daddy’s chair, listening to the smooth, deep rumble of his voice read The Chronicle of Narnia. The basketball court where we played and talked, and I learned to make sense of the world. 

So much beauty and goodness. It’s odd, then, that Home also carries my strongest memory of grief. It was springtime. You could smell it, the waking up of tree and root and soil. The return of songbirds and chirping insects. Spring is the restoration of that which was lost. 

If spring is restoration, it hardly felt like it on those nights when the hospice nurse went up and down the stairs. I would lay in the dark next to an open window, humidity in my hair, and listen to the suck-woosh, suck-woosh of an oxygen machine. Listen for one breath hungry for air, then a long pause, then another breath. Listening and waiting. 

But then the morning came, and a brief rain, just enough to make it all clean again and the trees greener than they had been the day before. Nothing seemed as frightening because it was spring. There was so much life, so much newness. Promise for this day and the next. 

It was that promise in God’s enduring goodness that transformed a day of death into a brighter, smoother river stone. It’s one of life’s mysteries, how the dark makes the light shine all the more brilliantly. 

That’s what the house has become to me, why it’s so painful to let go. It holds the strongest memories, the ones rooted so deeply inside of me that I no longer know the way. I don’t know how to say goodbye to that. I don’t know how to close the door. 

My last time in my parents’ house, I returned to that bedroom. The place where cancer took so much, but where the light eclipsed the darkness. I felt the tears burn, a lump in my throat, knowing I could never return but simultaneously realizing it’s been gone since it happened. The house itself was never the river stone. It was the water, the medium, and it’s leaving me. 

As I left the second floor for the final time, I paused on the staircase and laid a hand on my growing belly. I prayed for my son. I prayed that he would have the faith of his grandparents. That he would be the best of us. That he would love Jesus with his entire being because that’s the meaning. That’s the reason. If I ask God for nothing else, that’s what I want most. 

In a year where there’s been so much loss for all of us. So much grief and fear and letting go of the old that we loved. That’s how we move into the future. We go on for new life, strengthened by the old. 

The house may be gone. I still carry the river stone. 

P.S. Want to read an excerpt from my novel The Honest Lies? Catch up with it here.