It’s So Good To Be Home

About 4 weeks before Grant died, he’d gotten into buying home décor for the new house.  He loved those little decorative plaques with messages of cliché sayings. The ones that are true, and everybody knows them. They’re positive. When you see them, you think ahhh… yeah that’s so true.  He bought several.  Usually on a Walmart trip with the kids, so they weren't exactly designer quality, but they were really nice.  I was impressed by the Walmart finds. 

The most recent piece of wood décor said, “It’s so good to be home.”  Yeah I thought, it is. I love being at home.  My next thought was where is home?  We’d just moved to Hurricane, Utah, from South Jordan, Utah.  South Jordan was where it all began for us. It was our first house after renting and moving each year. The house where we wouldn't move again, but establish our life, plant roots so to speak.  

The two boys we already had were 2 and a half and 6 months old when we moved there. The only home they remembered. Our next two babies were born in that house, in the bathroom.  It was the only home we’d ever known as our family, our complete family.  We built our business there.  And yet, it never felt like “home” to me.  It felt like a place I lived.  So when we went to Hurricane and bought a newer home in an area that had the fun outdoor lifestyle; I wondered could this be home?  I wasn’t there long enough to know yet, when Grant died. 

That morning, the one after he died.  I walked around the house feeling like I was in a foreign place.  I felt like I was in a vacation rental and I needed to go home.  I realized I didn’t feel like I had a home.  Where was home for me?  Where was Grant?  Ahhhhh, I discerned… Grant WAS my home.  My home is now gone.  It registered. 

Home is where the people you truly love reside. They are your home.  Home is also where you came from; not where you were born, something bigger.  I believe that was the home I was looking for, and it’s not here on earth.  I yearned to be in the home where I began, where my heart was.  Where I was made, originally. 

This home is what I had always seen through the beauty all around me. I would experience it in the laugh of my baby, in the love of my husband. I felt it in the cozy warmth of a soft blanket wrapped around me with a baby on my lap and my head on Grant’s shoulder.  Those moments, where the love of something bigger was present; those times are when we touched the distant memories that live in the heart. A life from somewhere else, a life I couldn’t see right now, the life Grant had just gone back to.  Those are the memories, the feelings that were home to me.

I understand now that’s why none of these houses felt like home, it was never a house that was home for me.  I was homesick for my heavenly home.  Being here on earth was being away from my real home.  The morning Grant died, I had felt his spirit and it’s presence all around me and around the house. It was as if nothing had changed, but it all had.  He was home.  He was in the house, the one he wanted to make home, and he was in the place that had been a home in a different way.  That one I couldn’t see, but feel.  I could feel him here in the house, but knew he was there in the unseen home. 

I walked by the plaque.  The one that said, “It’s so good to be home.”  When I read those words again now, I could feel his presence next to mine.  He replied, “Yeah it really is.”   Happiness for him filled me.  He was in the home I was trying to find.  The one where the beauty is infinite and all the wrongs are made right.  The place where my heart was, in 2 ways now. 

Grant had found the parts of me still present in our earthly home the moment he arrived. He got there somehow.  He now in another realm, realized that’s where my heart had been all along.  Now that he was there and here, he understood me in a whole new way. He finally got my incessant search to feel at home.   He’d found our original home.

In the process of finding our original home he inadvertently took away my home in him with him when he left.  Now it seemed home for me was completely where he was. Both he and my origins were somewhere I was not. Home was over there for me.  I finally realized it in my self as well as in him. Yet, I also knew instinctively, I wouldn't go there, not yet. I still have a home to create here, somehow, somewhere, someway. And I will, and it will be amazing.