Erasures

I spent this past weekend in Columbia, South Carolina. In part, I was there to see Attorney General Eric Holder speak the annual “King Day at the Dome,” but I had also made the trek from Atlanta to spend time with my partner’s family. This was only the second time I’d met his parents (who are lovely)–and the first time I’d been to his childhood home.

We sat for awhile on the carpeted floor of the small bedroom he’d grown up in, a leaning shelf of books towering over us. Framed pictures of his family were scattered about, and a bulletin board was covered in photos of boys with 90s haircuts, their arms slung over each others’ shoulders. I laughed, flipping through his senior yearbook, and ran my fingers across books about English literature, African history, law and politics. Though he hadn’t lived there for years, the room was thoroughly T, and a great opportunity to see the boy behind the man I have come to know and love.

As I stood up to hug him I suddenly realized I do not have such a past to show him. My old room, with its ridiculous horse wallpaper, has likely been stripped and repainted, redecorated to suit the tastes of a different little girl. I cannot laughingly explain that as a horse-crazy ten year old I gave names to each of the horses pictured on the border’s repeating pattern. There are not awkward photos of my gangly teenage self tucked into the corners of the mirror my mom purchased years ago at a church rummage sale. I will not explain the framed family photographs in our narrow hallway, on carpet worn thin by years of playing invented games of ‘horse’ and ‘hand soccer’ with my siblings.

I will not get to sit with a mug of coffee at the round antique table in our ivy-papered kitchen, overlooking my dad’s garden and the horse pasture, undulating with chest high grass and purple tufts of thistle, the gnarled old apple tree bending low in a corner of peeling fence I painted with my dad.

I have always believed that home is with the people I love. I still believe this. But what happens when I lose both the person I love, and the house that held so many precious memories of her? My mon died and suddenly the bricks of our enormous fireplace, the sheen of the oak china cabinet, and the old maple with our creaking tree house became precious. Holy, even. Imbued with my memories of her.

In selling my childhood home and moving away, I have come to better understand the emotions that motivate people to make shrines of the rooms of their departed loved ones. I know my mom is not coming back, but I could feel her so vividly when I sat in the overstuffed chair she used to grade papers in, or when I stood beside the old sewing table in the laundry room, or watched the finches on the feeder outside the kitchen window.

But now, even those bittersweet comforts belong to another family. Even now they are replacing the carpets, stripping wallpaper and painting walls. The treehouse is getting a new floor, the pasture fence some much needed repairs. They are, in short, beginning a lifetime of new memories in a house that is now their home.

It’s not that I wish this weren’t the case. It was necessary for my dad and step mom to get a new start. Life is not lived fully from inside a shrine to the past. But sitting on the floor in T’s room, surrounded by his books and photographs, with both his parents sitting a few rooms away downstairs, it was hard not to feel that the tangible portions of my own past are being steadily erased.

And while I tell myself that this is inevitable for all of us–houses are sold, schools remodeled, moves undertaken–the fading evidence of my past life leaves me feeling panicked.

My mom is trapped in that past. If I lose it, do I lose her? And without familiar kitchen cabinets, hallways, and door handles, how do I put her in context for those to whom she will never be more than a story?