A Sense Of Comfort

TW: Grief

When you're reading a book and the character describes their home, do you picture a specific house? Is it yours? A friend's?

Mine has always been my grandparents’ house. The most specific example I can remember is when I read the fifth Harry Potter book. If you're not familiar, or need a refresher, a group of wizards come to get Harry from his aunt and uncle’s house to take him somewhere else (if I go into any more detail, we'll be here all day). While they're explaining to Harry who they are and why they're there, all of them are standing in harry’s relatives’ house. When I read this section, I set it in my grandparents’ basement. I remember imagining Tonks, one of the characters, sitting on top of the washing machine in the basement.

I've also found that, when I write, I tend to describe a character's house in the style of my grandparents' home.

My grandparents moved into that house shortly before they adopted my mom and my uncle in the early 1970s. They built onto it quite a bit to expand. When you walk through the door, you’re hit with a smell that, even though it sounds weird, I would describe in itself as inviting.

There are two steps that lead you into the kitchen, the other direction a stairwell the goes down to the basement. If you go into the kitchen, you see the dining room through an open doorway. Decades of birthday parties, Christmases, Easters, and Thanksgivings occurred around that table. When I was really little, my brother, cousins and I were put at a separate, smaller kids table. I don’t remember when our family decided that it made more sense for all of us to sit together.

There are three bedrooms in the house. At some point my grandparents began sleeping in different rooms–Grandma always said it was because Grandpa snored too loud–so when I spent the night, I would sleep with her in what was my uncle’s childhood room.

A few weeks ago, my parents and I went to my grandparents’ house to look for something of my grandma’s. I realized that I had not been in her bedroom since she passed away at the beginning of 2020, and as soon as I stepped through the door, I started crying. It felt wrong to be in there when she wasn’t. As we were looking through her dressers, we found pictures of our family, including me with a friend of mine when we were little, and that friend passed away when I was in high school. That just added another layer of grief on top of my already bursting emotions.

My mom and I found some of my grandma’s yearbooks from when she was in high school, and we spent at least twenty minutes just flipping through them, reading the notes people wrote to her. It made me smile, seeing that she was so loved by the people she knew—then and now.

I think my brain uses my grandparents’ house as the setting for many books is because it is a place that is full of so many great memories. It’s a place where I spent most of my childhood, a second home.

It was good for me to go that night, to walk through the house and let myself feel the feelings that I am still working through surrounding her passing. I miss her everyday, but her spirit is still in that house, in the decorations, the pictures.

I hope you let yourself feel those difficult feelings, too.

—Abbie