It doesn’t matter how long ago we first started grieving, as children or adults, from a single catastrophic event or from multiple traumas, sometimes without any warning grief opens a door to feelings we locked away long ago. For me it has taken sixteen years for this particular door to crack open.

As part of my New Year commitment to turning my life around after the malaise-driven exercise in frustration that was 2012, I have started meditating again every morning. I vary the practice, from zazen to guided meditations to Hindu chants, but I figure the important thing is to get my butt on a cushion and practice mindfulness.

This morning, halfway through the session, the word “HOME” struck my brain like lightening. My eyes snapped open and I looked around, without much thought, at the living room of my apartment. It’s nothing special nor have I have tried to make it so. Quite frankly, I never have, not with any of the places I’ve lived since I walked out of my parent’s house.

…see what I did there? “My parent’s house.” Not, “my home.” Yet it WAS my home, for many years. It was my refuge and my anchor, the place where I could go and be safe. Sure, it was my parents’ place and they were not exactly “house proud” people (the place was a bit run down, and ugly) but it was home.

It is something I have spent a lot of time walking away from, and never trying to replace. Oh, I’ve lived in decent places, painted the walls, hung up paintings, and all that sort of thing. But they have always felt temporary. They’ve always felt like college housing, I suppose: my place, but not really, and not for long.

This apartment I’ve lived in for nearly five years now, a record for me. And as I looked around at it this morning, I realized how hard I’ve worked NOT to make it a home. Even with paintings on the wall and a studio where I do all of my writing and drawing and even some landscaping I’ve done for the hell of it, I have always mentally kept myself at arm’s length from thinking about it as home.

I could not do that this morning. Like being slammed by a summer squall, I sat in the middle of my living room on my meditation mat in shock, pummeled by the emotional onslaught of my insight: for me to ever have a home again, I have to create it for myself.

My parents died and part of me just assumed that “home” died with them. That when I walked out of the house on Alta Vista Street, I was walking away from home forever.

Part of me was, but now, so many years later, I know what I miss and what I need: HOME. My place, full of my heart and soul and hopes and dreams and tears.

I cried for a long time, way past my scheduled meditation time. I cried for the home I’m never going back to, that is well and truly dead, but in doing so I let myself actually mourn it. I acknowledged that loss at last, 16 years after the fact. Then I looked around at the temporary place I’ve lived in for five years, through graduate school and the souring of my marriage and divorce and the death of Pirate. I looked at it with fresh eyes and an open heart.

I’ve come home at last.