Homes

May 15th, 2021

Hey. I am beyond exhausted and overwhelmed at the moment, but I wanted to sincerely thank everyone who made time for us today. We made it work despite being a full year out of small talk practice, and your presence was felt and can’t be overstated. Today I felt a huge part fall out from under me and it was a relief to see so many pick up the pieces.

I also wanted to talk about homes.

It’s funny, because I always think of Minneapolis as our first home, because that’s where I was born, and where our family was started, just the three of us. But Princeton was also her home, where she was a piece of a different family before ours. And there was a home in Wisconsin and a home in East Bethel. And I forgot how much Faribault was her home, even before she had us kids, even before she met my dad. How the Deaf School was her home, the surrounding woods, downtown, cold waters, open fields, locked dorms.

But I wasn’t prepared to be exposed to an actual constellation of homes that I hadn’t really considered.

As I looked around the room today during the service, I realized that she had made a home in every single person I could see. Some of us had come from her, some of us had ran to her, but she had passed through everybody just the same. She saw each one of us, she smiled, and she made a home we couldn’t see but would have to feel for the rest of our lives.

After we put everything away and we drifted back to regularly scheduled programming, I took a drive down the street to the school. I walked around the campus, I took in the sights she had seen, I recycled the air she had breathed, I found this spot in the woods where I was able to let out the things I couldn’t let out anywhere else, looking at trees she had imagined a life beyond.

It’s not fair.

It is hard to let the person who was sick go, but hearing about her when she was alive, and she was the most very alive person who had ever lived, that just breaks me down to slivers of fragments of pieces. That is the thing that makes you realize that there are levels to this, and it is very easy to lose your balance if you’re not keeping your eyes on the horizon.

I’m going to get back to replenishing my electrolytes, but I really did want to thank everyone in my own way. Thank you, and all my love. Keep your homes safely built in your memories.