Debra-Lynn B. Hook
I was baffled when doctors told me I was well enough to go home.
I still couldn’t walk, even after months of inpatient rehab for sciatica.
As for home? What would that even look like?
Of course I’d be returning to the same physical structure. It was still the second house on the left on the cul de sac in the little Ohio college town where I’d nursed babies and made shepherd’s pies and worn the face of the happy professor’s wife.
It was still the only house of any color on the street. With an affectionate nod to New Orleans, where my nomad Mama up and moved us from South Carolina when I was 17, I’d dared to repaint the house a bright yellow with turquoise shutters. It offended one snarky neighbor on the street of brown and gray enough to bark, “Your house looks like Pee Wee Herman’s Playhouse.”
Home was an otherwise unimposing place. The final listing our Realtor showed us, it was small and did not have the two-car garage and separate dining room my husband and I said we had to have. Still, when we walked in, we were taken, by the light, by the way the afternoon sun spilled gold through the leaves of the tall trees surrounding the house onto the polished hardwood floors.
The Realtor warned us this might happen: When buyers find a house that speaks to something deeper, it won’t matter that there is only a one-car garage.
And so it was, for 25 years, this was home. It was the first and only house my husband and I ever owned, a safe haven we deemed to create for us and for our three children after the broken homes we’d suffered, a place where dreams could be expressed and realized, and laughter was more prevalent than crying but crying was allowed, a place where soccer shoes were lost but then found and “Goodnight Moon” was read one more time.
Now here I was going back.
Only this time, I was alone. The kids were just recently gone, the marriage, over. Any hope of reconciliation had died with my husband when he passed, tragically, of early onset dementia, while I was in rehab.
Perhaps worst of all, with my immobility issues and the attendant pain and a diagnosis of cancer, I could no longer hold the center. I could not walk to the toilet, much less make a Sunday dinner, host Christmas, keep muffins warm and dreams alive.
I was afraid when I got home that all I would know was pain and grief and ghosts.
For the first weeks and months, I gave in to mourning. Helpers made breakfast and lunch and aided me as I hobbled from room to room, the same rooms where my children learned to walk.
In the afternoons, they would leave, and I would be alone. I cried out in pain at night so loud sometimes I thought the police would come. I baked in the sorrow and gave it space, knowing I had to, lest it choke me unawares.
I remembered to deep breathe and call my sisters and that my children loved me. But any recovery was slow. The pain, both psychic and physical, overwhelmed. And when I got sick of it all, I found there was nothing left to do but lie in stillness where I would wait for nothing. Nothing and nobody. No time. No space. No thoughts. Emptiness was what there was.
Until one day when I was conscious of looking up at the trees that had called me here in the first place. Up and up and up, my gaze took me. Up to the tops of the tall, old trees, all the way up to where their branches brushed the sky.
On breezy days, branches rustling mightily in the wind, it was easy to see what I was looking for. On still days, though, too, even a hint was enough. The slightest movement was all I needed.
I wasn’t so trite as to believe the trees were waving at me.
But it was something akin to that.
These majestic, eternal beings, who gave of their shade and beauty and oxygen, who presided over the seasons of our lives, were letting me know they were presiding still.
Beyond the pain, beyond the suffering and the loss, there was life.
“It can sometimes take a long time to see,” wrote Georgia O’Keeffe.
The trees had been there all along, calling me up, calling me in, calling me home.
Debra-Lynn B. Hook of Kent, Ohio, has been writing about family life since 1988. Visit her website at www.debralynnhook.com; email her at [email protected], or join her column’s Facebook discussion group at Debra-Lynn Hook: Bringing Up Mommy.
