essay about missing home

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When Things Go Missing

A couple of years ago, I spent the summer in Portland, Oregon, losing things. I normally live on the East Coast, but that year, unable to face another sweltering August, I decided to temporarily decamp to the West. This turned out to be strangely easy. I’d lived in Portland for a while after college, and some acquaintances there needed a house sitter. Another friend was away for the summer and happy to loan me her pickup truck. Someone on Craigslist sold me a bike for next to nothing. In very short order, and with very little effort, everything fell into place.

And then, mystifyingly, everything fell out of place. My first day in town, I left the keys to the truck on the counter of a coffee shop. The next day, I left the keys to the house in the front door. A few days after that, warming up in the midday sun at an outdoor café, I took off the long-sleeved shirt I’d been wearing, only to leave it hanging over the back of the chair when I headed home. When I returned to claim it, I discovered that I’d left my wallet behind as well. Prior to that summer, I should note, I had lost a wallet exactly once in my adult life: at gunpoint. Yet later that afternoon I stopped by a sporting-goods store to buy a lock for my new bike and left my wallet sitting next to the cash register.

I got the wallet back, but the next day I lost the bike lock. I’d just arrived home and removed it from its packaging when my phone rang; I stepped away to take the call, and when I returned, some time later, the lock had vanished. This was annoying, because I was planning to bike downtown that evening, to attend an event at Powell’s, Portland’s famous bookstore. Eventually, having spent an absurd amount of time looking for the lock and failing to find it, I gave up and drove the truck downtown instead. I parked, went to the event, hung around talking for a while afterward, browsed the bookshelves, walked outside into a lovely summer evening, and could not find the truck anywhere.

This was a serious feat, a real bar-raising of thing-losing, not only because in general it is difficult to lose a truck but also because the truck in question was enormous. The friend to whom it belonged once worked as an ambulance driver; oversized vehicles do not faze her. It had tires that came up to my midriff, an extended cab, and a bed big enough to haul cetaceans. Yet I’d somehow managed to misplace it in downtown Portland—a city, incidentally, that I know as well as any other on the planet. For the next forty-five minutes, as a cool blue night gradually lowered itself over downtown, I walked around looking for the truck, first on the street where I was sure I’d parked, then on the nearest cross streets, and then in a grid whose scale grew ever larger and more ludicrous.

Finally, I returned to the street where I’d started and noticed a small sign: “ No Parking Anytime .” Oh, shit. Feeling like the world’s biggest idiot, and wondering how much it was going to cost to extricate a truck the size of Nevada from a tow lot, I called the Portland Police Department. The man who answered was wonderfully affable. “No, Ma’am,” he veritably sang into the phone, “no pickup trucks from downtown this evening. Must be your lucky day!” Officer, you have no idea. Channelling the kind of advice one is often given as a child, I returned to the bookstore, calmed myself down with a cup of tea, collected my thoughts amid the latest literary débuts, and then, to the best of my ability, retraced the entire course of my evening, in the hope that doing so would knock loose some memory of how I got there. It did not. Back outside on the streets of Portland, I spun around as uselessly as a dowsing rod.

Seventy-five minutes later, I found the truck, in a perfectly legal parking space, on a block so unrelated to any reasonable route from my house to the bookstore that I seriously wondered if I’d driven there in some kind of fugue state. I climbed in, headed home, and, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, decided that I needed to call my sister as soon as I walked in the door. But I did not. I could not. My cell phone was back at Powell’s, on a shelf with all the other New Arrivals.

My sister is a cognitive scientist at M.I.T., more conversant than most people in the mental processes involved in tracking and misplacing objects. That is not, however, why I wanted to talk to her about my newly acquired propensity for losing things. I wanted to talk to her because, true to the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, she is the most scatterbrained person I’ve ever met.

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There is a runner-up: my father. My family members, otherwise a fairly similar bunch, are curiously divided down the middle in this respect. On the spectrum of obsessively orderly to sublimely unconcerned with the everyday physical world, my father and my sister are—actually, they are nowhere. They can’t even find the spectrum. My mother and I, meanwhile, are busy organizing it by size and color. I will never forget watching my mother try to adjust an ever so slightly askew picture frame—at the Cleveland Museum of Art. My father, by contrast, once spent an entire vacation wearing mismatched shoes, because he’d packed no others and discovered the mistake only when airport security asked him to remove them. My sister’s best T.S.A. trick, meanwhile, involved borrowing her partner’s laptop, then accidentally leaving it at an Alaska Airlines gate one week after 9/11, thereby almost shutting down the Oakland airport.

That’s why I called her when I started uncharacteristically misplacing stuff myself. For one thing, I thought she might commiserate. For another, I thought she might help; given her extensive experience with losing things, I figured she must have developed a compensatory capacity for finding them. Once I recovered my phone and reached her, however, both hopes vanished as completely as the bike lock. My sister was gratifyingly astonished that I’d never lost my wallet before, but, as someone who typically has to reconstruct the entire contents of her own several times a year, she was not exactly sympathetic. “Call me,” she said, “when they know your name at the D.M.V.”

Nor did my sister have any good advice on how to find missing objects—although, in fairness, such advice is itself difficult to find. Plenty of parents, self-help gurus, and psychics will offer to assist you in finding lost stuff, but most of their suggestions are either obvious (calm down, clean up), suspect (the “eighteen-inch rule,” whereby the majority of missing items are supposedly lurking less than two feet from where you first thought they would be), or New Agey. (“Picture a silvery cord reaching from your chest all the way out to your lost object.”) Advice on how to find missing things also abounds online, but as a rule it is useful only in proportion to the strangeness of whatever you’ve lost. Thus, the Internet is middling on your lost credit card or Kindle, but edifying on your lost Roomba (look inside upholstered furniture), your lost marijuana (your high self probably hid it in a fit of paranoia; try your sock drawer), your lost drone (you’ll need a specially designed G.P.S.), or your lost bitcoins (good luck with that). The same basic dynamic applies to the countless Web sites devoted to recovering lost pets, which are largely useless when it comes to your missing Lab mix but surprisingly helpful when it comes to your missing ball python. Such Web sites can also be counted on for excellent anecdotes, like the one about the cat that vanished in Nottinghamshire, England, and was found, fourteen months later, in a pet-food warehouse, twice its original size.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about lost entities and the Internet is that it has made many of them considerably easier to find: out-of-print books, elementary-school classmates, decades-old damning quotes by politicians. More generally, modern technology can sometimes help us find misplaced objects, as you know if you’ve ever had your girlfriend call your lost cell phone, or used that little button on your keys to make your Toyota Camry honk at you. Lately, we’ve seen a boom in technologies specifically designed to compensate for our tendency to lose stuff: Apple’s Find My iPhone, for instance, and the proliferation of Bluetooth-enabled tracking devices that you can attach to everyday objects in order to summon them from the ether, like the Accio spell in the “Harry Potter” books.

These tricks, while helpful, have their limitations. Your phone needs to be on and non-dead; your car needs to be within range; you need to have the foresight to stick a tracking device onto the particular thing you’re going to lose before you’ve lost it. Moreover, as anyone who’s ever owned a remote control can tell you, new technologies themselves are often infuriatingly unfindable, a problem made worse by the trend toward ever smaller gadgets. It is difficult to lose an Apple IIe, easier to lose a laptop, a snap to lose a cell phone, and nearly impossible not to lose a flash drive. Then, there is the issue of passwords, which are to computers what socks are to washing machines. The only thing in the real or the digital world harder to keep track of than a password is the information required to retrieve it, which is why it is possible, as a grown adult, to find yourself caring about your first-grade teacher’s pet iguana’s maiden name.

Passwords, passports, umbrellas, scarves, earrings, earbuds, musical instruments, W-2s, that letter you meant to answer, the permission slip for your daughter’s field trip, the can of paint you scrupulously set aside three years ago for the touch-up job you knew you’d someday need: the range of things we lose and the readiness with which we do so are staggering. Data from one insurance-company survey suggest that the average person misplaces up to nine objects a day, which means that, by the time we turn sixty, we will have lost up to two hundred thousand things. (These figures seem preposterous until you reflect on all those times you holler up the stairs to ask your partner if she’s seen your jacket, or on how often you search the couch cushions for the pen you were just using, or on that daily almost-out-the-door flurry when you can’t find your kid’s lunchbox or your car keys.) Granted, you’ll get many of those items back, but you’ll never get back the time you wasted looking for them. In the course of your life, you’ll spend roughly six solid months looking for missing objects; here in the United States, that translates to, collectively, some fifty-four million hours spent searching a day . And there’s the associated loss of money: in the U.S. in 2011, thirty billion dollars on misplaced cell phones alone.

Broadly speaking, there are two explanations for why we lose all this stuff—one scientific, the other psychoanalytic, both unsatisfying. According to the scientific account, losing things represents a failure of recollection or a failure of attention: either we can’t retrieve a memory (of where we set down our wallet, say) or we didn’t encode one in the first place. According to the psychoanalytic account, conversely, losing things represents a success —a deliberate sabotage of our rational mind by our subliminal desires. In “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” Freud describes “the unconscious dexterity with which an object is mislaid on account of hidden but powerful motives,” including “the low estimation in which the lost object is held, or a secret antipathy towards it or towards the person that it came from.” Freud’s colleague and contemporary Abraham Arden Brill put the matter more succinctly: “We never lose what we highly value.”

As explanations go, the scientific one is persuasive but uninteresting. It sheds no light on how it feels to lose something, and provides only the most abstract and impractical notion of how not to do so. (Focus! And, while you’re at it, rejigger your genes or circumstances to improve your memory.) The psychological account, by contrast, is interesting, entertaining, and theoretically helpful (Freud pointed out “the remarkable sureness shown in finding the object again once the motive for its being mislaid had expired”) but, alas, untrue. The most charitable thing to be said about it is that it wildly overestimates our species: absent subconscious motives, apparently, we would never lose anything at all.

That is patently false—but, like many psychological claims, impossible to actually falsify. Maybe the doting mother who lost her toddler at the mall was secretly fed up with the demands of motherhood. Maybe my sister loses her wallet so often owing to a deep-seated discomfort with capitalism. Maybe the guy who left his “Hamilton” tickets in the taxi was a Jeffersonian at heart. Freud would stand by such propositions, and no doubt some losses really are occasioned by subconscious emotion, or at least can be convincingly explained that way after the fact. But experience tells us that such cases are unusual, if they exist at all. The better explanation, most of the time, is simply that life is complicated and minds are limited. We lose things because we are flawed; because we are human; because we have things to lose.

Of all the lost objects in literature, one of my favorites appears—or, rather, disappears—in Patti Smith’s 2015 memoir, “M Train.” Although that book is ultimately concerned with far more serious losses, Smith pauses midway through to describe the experience of losing a beloved black coat that a friend gave her, off his own back, on her fifty-seventh birthday. The coat wasn’t much to look at—moth-eaten, coming apart at the seams, itself optimized for losing things by the gaping holes in each pocket—but, Smith writes, “Every time I put it on I felt like myself.” Then came a particularly harsh winter, which required a warmer jacket, and by the time the air turned mild again the coat was nowhere to be seen.

When we lose something, our first reaction, naturally enough, is to want to know where it is. But behind that question about location lurks a question about causality: What happened to it? What agent or force made it disappear? Such questions matter because they can help direct our search. You will act differently if you think you left your coat in a taxi or believe you boxed it up and put it in the basement. Just as important, the answers can provide us with that much coveted condition known as closure. It is good to get your keys back, better still to understand how they wound up in your neighbor’s recycling bin.

But questions about causality can also lead to trouble, because, in essence, they ask us to assign blame. Being human, we’re often reluctant to assign it to ourselves—and when it comes to missing possessions it is always possible (and occasionally true) that someone else caused them to disappear. This is how a problem with an object turns into a problem with a person. You swear you left the bill sitting on the table for your wife to mail; your wife swears with equal vehemence that it was never there; soon enough, you have also both lost your tempers.

Another possibility, considerably less likely but equally self-sparing, is that your missing object engineered its own vanishing, alone or in conjunction with other occult forces. Beloved possessions like her black coat, Patti Smith suggests, are sometimes “drawn into that half-dimensional place where things just disappear.” Such explanations are more common than you might think. Given enough time spent searching for something that was just there , even the most scientifically inclined person on the planet will start positing various highly improbable culprits: wormholes, aliens, goblins, ether.

That is an impressive act of outsourcing, given that nine times out of ten we are to blame for losing whatever it is that we can’t find. In the micro-drama of loss, in other words, we are nearly always both villain and victim. That goes some way toward explaining why people often say that losing things drives them crazy. At best, our failure to locate something that we ourselves last handled suggests that our memory is shot; at worst, it calls into question the very nature and continuity of selfhood. (If you’ve ever lost something that you deliberately stashed away for safekeeping, you know that the resulting frustration stems not just from a failure of memory but from a failure of inference. As one astute Internet commentator asked, “Why is it so hard to think like myself?”) Part of what makes loss such a surprisingly complicated phenomenon, then, is that it is inextricable from the extremely complicated phenomenon of human cognition.

This entanglement becomes more fraught as we grow older. Beyond a certain age, every act of losing gets subjected to an extra layer of scrutiny, in case what you have actually lost is your mind. Most such acts don’t indicate pathology, of course, but real mental decline does manifest partly as an uptick in lost things. Dementia patients are prone to misplacing their belongings, and people with early-stage Alzheimer’s often can’t find objects because they have put them in unlikely locations; the eyeglasses end up in the oven, the dentures in the coffee can. Such losses sadden us because they presage larger ones—of autonomy, of intellectual capacity, ultimately of life itself.

No wonder losing things, even trivial things, can be so upsetting. Regardless of what goes missing, loss puts us in our place; it confronts us with lack of order and loss of control and the fleeting nature of existence. When Patti Smith gives up on finding her black coat, she imagines that, together with all of the world’s other missing objects, it has gone to dwell in a place her husband liked to call the Valley of Lost Things. The shadow that is missing from that phrase darkens her memoir; in the course of it, Smith also describes losing her best friend, her brother, her mother, and that husband (at age forty-five, to heart failure).

On the face of it, such losses fit in poorly with lesser ones. It is one thing to lose a wedding ring, something else entirely to lose a spouse. This is the distinction Elizabeth Bishop illuminates, by pretending to elide it, in her villanelle “One Art,” perhaps the most famous reckoning with loss in all of literature. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” she writes in the opening line; the trick is to begin with trivial losses, like door keys, and practice until you can handle those which are tragic. No one could take this suggestion seriously, and we aren’t meant to do so. Through its content as well as its form, the poem ultimately concedes that all other losses pale beside the loss of a loved one.

Moreover, although Bishop doesn’t make this point explicitly, death differs from other losses not only in degree but in kind. With objects, loss implies the possibility of recovery; in theory, at least, nearly every missing possession can be restored to its owner. That’s why the defining emotion of losing things isn’t frustration or panic or sadness but, paradoxically, hope. With people, by contrast, loss is not a transitional state but a terminal one. Outside of an afterlife, for those who believe in one, it leaves us with nothing to hope for and nothing to do. Death is loss without the possibility of being found.

My father, in addition to being scatterbrained and mismatched and menschy and brilliant, is dead. I lost him, as we say, in the third week of September, just before the autumn equinox. Since then, the days have darkened, and I, too, have been lost: adrift, disoriented, absent. Or perhaps it would be more apt to say that I have been at a loss —a strange turn of phrase, as if loss were a place in the physical world, a kind of reverse oasis or Bermuda Triangle where the spirit fails and the compass needle spins.

Like death more generally, my father’s was somehow both predictable and shocking. For nearly a decade, his health had been poor, almost impressively so. In addition to suffering from many of the usual complaints of contemporary aging (high blood pressure, high cholesterol, kidney disease, congestive heart failure), he had endured illnesses unusual for any age and era: viral meningitis, West Nile encephalitis, an autoimmune disorder whose identity evaded the best doctors at the Cleveland Clinic. From there, the list spread outward in all directions of physiology and severity. He had fallen and torn a rotator cuff beyond recovery, and obliterated a patellar tendon by missing a step one Fourth of July. His breathing was often labored despite no evident respiratory problem; an errant nerve in his neck sometimes zapped him into temporary near-paralysis. He had terrible dental issues, like the impoverished child he had once been, and terrible gout, like the wealthy old potentate he cheerfully became.

He was, in short, a shambles. And yet, as the E.R. visits added up over the years, I gradually curbed my initial feelings of panic and dread—partly because no one can live in a state of crisis forever but also because, by and large, my father bore his infirmity with insouciance. (“Biopsy Thursday,” he once wrote me about a problem with his carotid artery. “Have no idea when the autopsy will be and may not be informed of it.”) More to the point, against considerable odds, he just kept on being alive. Intellectually, I knew that no one could manage such a serious disease burden forever. Yet the sheer number of times my father had courted death and then recovered had, perversely, made him seem indomitable.

As a result, I was not overly alarmed when my mother called one morning toward the end of the summer to say that my father had been hospitalized with a bout of atrial fibrillation. Nor was I surprised, when my partner and I got to town that night, to learn that his heart rhythm had stabilized. The doctors were keeping him in the hospital chiefly for observation, they told us, and also because his white-bloodcell count was mysteriously high. When my father related the chain of events to us—he had gone to a routine cardiology appointment, only to be shunted straight to the I.C.U.—he was jovial and accurate and eminently himself. He remained in good spirits the following day, although he was extremely garrulous, not in his usual effusive way but slightly manic, slightly off—a consequence, the doctors explained, of toxins building up in his bloodstream from temporary loss of kidney function. If it didn’t resolve on its own in a day or two, they planned to give him a round of dialysis to clear it.

That was on a Wednesday. Over the next two days, the garrulousness declined into incoherence; then, on Saturday, my father lapsed into unresponsiveness. Somewhere below his silence lurked six languages, the result of being born in Tel Aviv to parents who had fled pogroms in Poland, relocating at age seven to Germany (an unusual reverse exodus for a family of Jews in 1948, precipitated by limited travel options and violence in what was then still Palestine), and arriving in the United States, on a refugee visa, at the age of twelve. English, French, German, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew: of these, my father acquired the first one last, and spoke it with Nabokovian fluency and panache. He loved to talk—I mean that he found just putting sentences together tremendously fun, although he also cherished conversation—and he talked his way into, out of, and through everything, including illness. During the years of medical crises, I had seen my father racked and raving with fever. I had seen him in a dozen kinds of pain. I had seen him hallucinating—sometimes while fully aware of it, discussing with us not only the mystery of his visions but also the mystery of cognition. I had seen him cast about in a mind temporarily compromised by illness and catch only strange, dark, pelagic creatures, unknown and fearsome to the rest of us. In all that time, under all those varied conditions, I had never known him to lack for words. But now, for five days, he held his silence. On the sixth, he lurched back into sound, but not into himself; there followed an awful night of struggle and agitation. After that, aside from a few scattered words, some mystifying, some seemingly lucid—“Hi!”; “Machu Picchu”; “I’m dying”—my father never spoke again.

Even so, for a while longer, he endured—I mean his him-ness, his Isaac-ness, that inexplicable, assertive bit of self in each of us. A few days before his death, having ignored every request made of him by a constant stream of medical professionals (“Mr. Schulz, can you wiggle your toes?” “Mr. Schulz, can you squeeze my hand?”), my father chose to respond to one final command: Mr. Schulz, we learned, could still stick out his tongue. His last voluntary movement, which he retained almost until the end, was the ability to kiss my mother. Whenever she leaned in close to brush his lips, he puckered up and returned the same brief, adoring gesture that I had seen all my days. In front of my sister and me, at least, it was my parents’ hello and goodbye, their “Sweet dreams” and “I’m only teasing,” their “I’m sorry” and “You’re beautiful” and “I love you”—the basic punctuation mark of their common language, the sign and seal of fifty years of happiness.

One night, while that essence still persisted, we gathered around, my father’s loved ones, and filled his silence with talk. I had always regarded my family as close, so it was startling to realize how much closer we could get, how near we drew around his dying flame. The room we were in was a cube of white, lit up like the aisle of a grocery store, yet in my memory that night is as dark and vibrant as a Rembrandt painting. We talked only of love; there was nothing else to say. My father, mute but alert, looked from one face to the next as we spoke, eyes shining with tears. I had always dreaded seeing him cry, and rarely did, but for once I was grateful. It told me what I needed to know: for what may have been the last time in his life, and perhaps the most important, he understood.

All this makes dying sound meaningful and sweet—and it is true that, if you are lucky, there is a seam of sweetness and meaning to be found within it, a vein of silver in a dark cave a thousand feet underground. Still, the cave is a cave. We had by then spent two vertiginous, elongated, atemporal weeks in the I.C.U. At no point during that time did we have a diagnosis, still less a prognosis. At every point, we were besieged with new possibilities, new tests, new doctors, new hopes, new fears. Every night, we arrived home exhausted, many hours past dark, and talked through what had happened, as if doing so might guide us through the following day. Then we’d wake up and resume the routine of the parking garage and the elevator and the twenty-four-hour Au Bon Pain, only to discover that, beyond those, there was no routine at all, nothing to help us prepare or plan. It was like trying to dress every morning for the weather in a nation we’d never heard of.

Eventually, we decided that my father would not recover, and so, instead of continuing to try to stave off death, we unbarred the door and began to wait. To my surprise, I found it comforting to be with him during that time, to sit by his side and hold his hand and watch his chest rise and fall with a familiar little riffle of snore. It was not, as they say, unbearably sad; on the contrary, it was bearably sad—a tranquil, contemplative, lapping kind of sorrow. I thought, as it turns out mistakenly, that what I was doing during those days was making my peace with his death. I have learned since then that even one’s unresponsive and dying father is, in some extremely salient way, still alive. And then, very early one morning, he was not.

What I remember best from those next hours is watching my mother cradle the top of my father’s head in her hand. A wife holding her dead husband, without trepidation, without denial, without any possibility of being cared for in return, just for the chance to be tender toward him one last time: it was the purest act of love I’ve ever seen. She looked bereft, beautiful, unimaginably calm. He did not yet look dead. He looked like my father. I could not stop picturing the way he used to push his glasses up onto his forehead to read. It struck me, right before everything else struck me much harder, that I should set them by his bed in case he needed them.

So began my second, darker season of losing things. Three weeks after my father died, so did another family member, of cancer. Three weeks after that, my home-town baseball team lost the World Series—an outcome that wouldn’t have affected me much if my father hadn’t been such an ardent fan. One week later, Hillary Clinton, together with sixty-six million voters, lost the Presidential election.

Like a dysfunctional form of love, which to some extent it is, grief has no boundaries; seldom this fall could I distinguish my distress over these later losses from my sadness about my father. I had maintained my composure during his memorial service, even while delivering the eulogy. But when, at the second funeral, the son of the deceased stood up to speak, I wept. Afterward, I couldn’t shake the sense that another shoe was about to drop—that at any moment I would learn that someone else close to me had died. The morning after the election, I cried again, missing my refugee father, missing the future I had thought would unfold. In its place, other kinds of losses suddenly seemed imminent: of civil rights, personal safety, financial security, the foundational American values of respect for dissent and difference, the institutions and protections of democracy.

For weeks, I slogged on like this, through waves of actual and anticipatory grief. I couldn’t stop conjuring catastrophes, political and otherwise. I felt a rising fear whenever my mother didn’t answer her phone, hated to see my sister board an airplane, could barely let my partner get in a car. “So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote, and, as much as my specific sadness, it was just that—the sheer quantity and inevitability of further suffering—that undid me.

Meanwhile, I had lost, along with everything else, all motivation; day after day, I did as close as humanly possible to nothing. In part, this was because I dreaded getting farther away from the time when my father was still alive. But it was also because, after all the obvious tasks of mourning were completed—the service over, the bureaucratic side of death dispatched, the clothing donated, the thank-you cards written—I had no idea what else to do. Although I had spent a decade worrying about losing my father, I had never once thought about what would come next. Like a heart, my imagination had always stopped at the moment of death.

Now, obliged to carry onward through time, I realized I didn’t know how. I found some consolation in poetry, but otherwise, for the first time in my life, I did not care to read. Nor could I bring myself to write, not least because any piece I produced would be the first my father wouldn’t see. I stretched out for as long as I could the small acts that felt easy and right (calling my mother and my sister, curling up with my partner, playing with the cats), but these alone could not occupy the days. Not since the age of eight, when I was still learning to master boredom, had life struck me so much as simply a problem of what to do.

It was during this time that I began to go out looking for my father. Some days, I merely said to myself that I wanted to get out of the house; other days, I set about searching for him as deliberately as one would go look for a missing glove. Because I find peace and clarity in nature, I did this searching outdoors, sometimes while walking, sometimes while out on a run. I did not expect, of course, that along the way I would encounter my father again in his physical form. To the extent that I thought about it at all, I thought that through sheer motion I might be able to create a tunnel of emptiness, in myself or in the world, that would fill up with a sense of his presence—his voice, his humor, his warmth, the perfect familiarity of our relationship.

I have subsequently learned, from the academic literature on grief, that this “searching behavior,” as it is called, is common among the bereaved. The psychologist John Bowlby, a contemporary of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, regarded the second stage of grief, after numbness, as “yearning and searching.” But I had never knowingly engaged in it before, because, in my experience, my dead had always come looking for me . After other people I’d loved had died, I had often felt them near me, sometimes heard their voices, and even, on a few exceedingly strange occasions, been jolted into the uncanny conviction that I had encountered them again in some altered but unmistakable form. (This, too, turns out to be common among the grieving. “I never thought Michiko would come back / after she died,” the poet Jack Gilbert wrote of his wife in “Alone.” “It is strange that she has returned / as somebody’s dalmatian.”)

These experiences, to be clear, do not comport with my understanding of death. I don’t believe that our loved ones can commune with us from beyond the grave, any more than I believe that spouses occasionally reincarnate as Dalmatians. But grief makes reckless cosmologists of us all, and I had thought it possible, in an impossible kind of way, that if I went out looking I might find myself in my father’s company again.

The first time, I turned around after five minutes; I have seldom tried anything that felt so futile. After he lost his wife, C. S. Lewis, who had likewise previously felt the dead to be near at hand, looked up at the night sky and, to his dismay, knew that he would never find her anywhere. “Is anything more certain,” he wrote, in “A Grief Observed,” “than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch?” Between his late wife and himself, he felt only “the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero.”

Thus do I feel about my father. “Lost” is precisely the right description for how I have experienced him since his death. I search for him constantly but can’t find him anywhere. I try to sense some intimation of his presence and feel nothing. I listen for his voice but haven’t heard it since those final times he used it in the hospital. Grieving him is like holding one of those homemade tin-can telephones with no tin can on the other end of the string. His absence is total; where there was him, there is nothing.

This was perhaps the most striking thing about my father’s death and all that followed: how relevant the idea of loss felt, how it seemed at once so capacious and so accurate. And in fact, to my surprise, it was accurate. Until I looked it up, I’d assumed that, unless we were talking about phone chargers or car keys or cake recipes, we were using the word “lost” figuratively, even euphemistically—that we say “I lost my father” to soften the blow of death.

But that turns out not to be true. The verb “to lose” has its taproot sunk in sorrow; it is related to the “lorn” in forlorn. It comes from an Old English word meaning to perish, which comes from a still more ancient word meaning to separate or cut apart. The modern sense of misplacing an object appeared later, in the thirteenth century; a hundred years after that, “to lose” acquired the meaning of failing to win. In the sixteenth century, we began to lose our minds; in the seventeenth century, our hearts. The circle of what we can lose, in other words, began with our own lives and one another and has been steadily expanding ever since. In consequence, loss today is a supremely awkward category, bulging with everything from mittens to life savings to loved ones, forcing into relationship all kinds of wildly dissimilar experiences.

And yet, if anything, our problem is not that we put too many things into the category of loss but that we leave too many out. One night, during those weeks when I could find solace only in poetry, my partner read “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” aloud to me. In it, Walt Whitman leans against the railing of a ship, exalting in all he sees. So expansive is his vision that it includes not just the piers and sails and reeling gulls but everyone else who makes the crossing: all those who stood at the railing watching before his birth, all those watching around him now, and all those who will be there watching after his death—which, in the poem, he doesn’t so much foresee as, through a wild, craning omniscience, look back on. “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,” he admonishes, kindly.

And, just like that, my sense of loss suddenly revealed itself as terribly narrow. What I miss about my father, as much as anything, is life as it looked filtered through him, held up and considered against his inner lights. Yet the most important thing that vanished when he died is wholly unavailable to me: life as it looked to him, life as we all live it, from the inside out. All my memories can’t add up to a single moment of what it was like to be my father, and all my loss pales beside his own. Like Whitman, his love of life had been exuberant, exhaustive; he must have hated, truly hated, to leave it behind—not just his family, whom he adored, but all of it, sea to shining sea.

It is breathtaking, the extinguishing of consciousness. Yet that loss, too—our own ultimate unbeing—is dwarfed by the grander scheme. When we are experiencing it, loss often feels like an anomaly, a disruption in the usual order of things. In fact, though, it is the usual order of things. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees and backs and memories, the childhood friend, the husband of fifty years, the father of forever, the keys to the house, the keys to the car, the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom itself: sooner or later, all of it drifts into the Valley of Lost Things.

There’s precious little solace for this, and zero redress; we will lose everything we love in the end. But why should that matter so much? By definition, we do not live in the end: we live all along the way. The smitten lovers who marvel every day at the miracle of having met each other are right; it is finding that is astonishing. You meet a stranger passing through your town and know within days you will marry her. You lose your job at fifty-five and shock yourself by finding a new calling ten years later. You have a thought and find the words. You face a crisis and find your courage.

All of this is made more precious, not less, by its impermanence. No matter what goes missing, the wallet or the father, the lessons are the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. As Whitman knew, our brief crossing is best spent attending to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, denouncing what we cannot abide, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep. ♦

Narrative Essay on Losing a Loved One

Narrative essay generator.

Losing a loved one is a profound experience that reshapes our lives in ways we never imagined. It’s a journey through grief that challenges our resilience, alters our perspectives, and ultimately teaches us about the depth of love and the impermanence of life. This narrative essay explores the emotional odyssey of losing a loved one, weaving through the stages of grief, the search for meaning, and the slow, often painful, journey towards healing.

The Unthinkable Reality

It was an ordinary Tuesday morning when the phone rang, shattering the normalcy of my life. The voice on the other end was calm yet distant, bearing the kind of news that instantly makes your heart sink. My beloved grandmother, who had been battling a long illness, had passed away in her sleep. Despite the inevitability of this moment, I was not prepared for the crushing weight of the reality that I would never see her again. The initial shock was numbing, a protective cloak that shielded me from the full impact of my loss.

The Onslaught of Grief

In the days that followed, grief washed over me in waves. At times, it was a quiet sadness that lingered in the background of my daily activities. At others, it was a torrential downpour of emotions, leaving me gasping for air. I struggled with the finality of death, replaying our last conversations, wishing for one more moment to express my love and gratitude. Anger, confusion, and disbelief intermingled, forming a tumultuous storm of feelings I could neither control nor understand.

The rituals of mourning—funeral arrangements, sympathy cards, and memorial services—offered a semblance of structure amidst the chaos. Yet, they also served as stark reminders of the gaping void left by my grandmother’s absence. Stories and memories shared by friends and family painted a rich tapestry of her life, highlighting the profound impact she had on those around her. Through tear-stained eyes, I began to see the extent of my loss, not just as a personal tragedy but as a collective one.

The Search for Meaning

As the initial shock subsided, my grief evolved into a quest for meaning. I sought solace in religion, philosophy, and the arts, searching for answers to the unanswerable questions of life and death. I learned that grief is a universal experience, a fundamental part of the human condition that transcends cultures, religions, and time periods. This realization brought a sense of connection to those who had walked this path before me, offering a glimmer of comfort in my darkest moments.

I also found meaning in honoring my grandmother’s legacy. She was a woman of incredible strength, kindness, and wisdom, who had touched the lives of many. By embodying her values and continuing her work, I could keep her spirit alive. Volunteering, pursuing passions that we shared, and passing on her stories to younger generations became ways to heal and to make sense of a world without her.

The Journey Towards Healing

Healing from the loss of a loved one is neither linear nor predictable. There were days when I felt overwhelmed by sadness, and others when I could smile at fond memories. I learned to accept that grief is not something to be “overcome” but rather integrated into my life. It has become a part of who I am, shaping my understanding of love, loss, and the preciousness of life.

Support from friends, family, and sometimes strangers, who shared their own stories of loss, played a crucial role in my healing process. Their empathy and understanding provided a safe space to express my feelings, to cry, to laugh, and to remember. Counseling and support groups offered additional perspectives and coping strategies, highlighting the importance of seeking help and connection in times of sorrow.

Reflections on Love and Loss

Through this journey, I have come to understand that the pain of loss is a testament to the depth of our love. Grieving deeply means we have loved deeply, and this is both the curse and the beauty of human connections. The scars of loss never truly fade, but they become bearable, interwoven with the love and memories we hold dear.

Losing a loved one is a transformative experience that teaches us about resilience, compassion, and the enduring power of love. It reminds us to cherish the time we have with those we love, to express our feelings openly, and to live fully in the present moment. While the absence of a loved one leaves an irreplaceable void, their influence continues to shape our lives in profound ways.

In closing, the journey through grief is uniquely personal, yet universally shared. It challenges us to find strength we didn’t know we had, to seek connection in our shared humanity, and to discover meaning in the face of loss. Though we may never “get over” the loss of a loved one, we learn to carry their legacy forward, finding solace in the love that never dies but transforms over time.

Text prompt

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Compose a narrative essay about a student's first day at a new school

Develop a narrative essay on a memorable school field trip.

• Craft Essays
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Getting Lost—and Found—in Personal Narrative

The ways of getting lost are no doubt infinite, but here are three, with prompts, that provide ample exploration in personal narrative:

Lost in a New Place

In her essay, “Typical First Year Professor” from Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial, 2014), Roxane Gay writes about moving to a small midwestern city to take her first full-time teaching job. She gets lost in her new building and must adapt and redefine herself in a setting very different from what she left behind:

I have an office I don’t have to share with two or four people. My name is on the engraved panel just outside my door. My name is spelled correctly. I have my own printer. The luxury of this cannot be overstated. I randomly print out a document; I sigh happily as the printer spits it out, warm. I have a phone with an extension, and when people call the number, they are often looking for me. There are a lot of shelves, but I like my books at home. In every movie I’ve ever seen about professors, there are books. I quickly unpack three boxes, detritus I accumulated in graduate school—sad drawer trash, books I’ll rarely open again—but I’m a professor now. I must have books on display in my office. It is an unspoken rule.

Gay’s arrival changes the landscape for her students, too. “Students don’t know what to make of me. I wear jeans and Converse. I have tattoos up and down my arms. I’m tall. I am not petite. I am the child of immigrants. Many of my students have never had a black teacher before. I can’t help them with that.” She clarifies that what’s unfamiliar to her students is not new to her. “I’m the only black professor in my department.” Although this aspect of her landscape is unchanged and unlikely to change, Gay acclimates to her new world and “finds” a transformed self in this new environment.

Think of a time when you started a new job or moved to a new place. List physical aspects of the setting that differed from where you’d been before. How did those differences represent who you were expected to be in the new place?

Bonus Prompt:

What physical traits such as attire, gender, body shape, mannerisms, skin color, ornamentation, did others see as unfamiliar? How did those differences affect your sense of belonging? What, if anything, helped you and others appreciate those differences?

Lost on the Way to a New Place

Sometimes we get lost travelling to a new place. In her essay, “Dear Mother,” from Dear Memory: Essays on Writing, Silence, and Grief (Milkweed Editions, 2021) , Victoria Chang contemplates her mother’s loss of homeland when, as a child, she relocated with her family from China to Taiwan. In epistle form, the narrator writes, “I would like to know if you took a train. If you walked. If you had pockets in your dress. If you wore pants. If your hand was in a fist, if you held a small stone.” Through Chang’s questions, we see the family’s exodus as disorienting, possibly frightening for a child, and how she might have carried something to remind her of home. “I would like to know if you thought the trees were black or green at night, if it was cold enough to see your breath, to sting your fingers. I would like to know who you spoke to along the way. If you had some preserved salty plums, which we both love, in your pocket.” The questions connect Chang with her mother but also reveal how the mother’s later move to the United States resulted in Chang’s lost connection with her extended family:

I would like to know where you got your food for the trip. Why I never knew your mother, father, or your siblings. I would like to have known your father. I would like to know what his voice sounded like. If it was brittle or pale. If it was blue or red. I would like to know the sound he made when he swallowed food. I would like to know if your mother was afraid.

Draft a letter to someone from your past whose journey entailed loss. This could be to a loved one who journeyed from life to death, or a relative sentenced to prison, or a friend who left home. Ask about what they saw, heard, smelled, ate, or carried.

In your letter, list the things you would like to know. Begin with physical details about the journey while allowing room for what you may have lost as a result of their departure.

Lost in a Familiar yet Changed Place

Sometimes we don’t go anywhere at all, but major life events make familiar places feel utterly foreign. In her essay, “ Still Life ” ( Brevity , Issue 62), Joanne Nelson writes of the last time she visited her brother Dale at his cabin:

A still life: barefoot, shirt but no pants, beer bottles and cigarettes and ashtray within reach. Even the smells suspended, unwashed, motionless. Piled mail. The place hazy with cigarette smoke.

Though the narrator cleans and cooks for her sick brother, no attempts to return the cabin to its previous state will return her brother to his previous state. She becomes “lost” in a space altered by illness, but the psychological act of getting lost occurs when the narrator becomes immersed in grief. Five years after his death, when a server calls out “Dale” in a diner, Nelson lists what’s missing, what she misses, what she’s lost:

I’d like to see him cross the foyer of rustling people-filled benches though, have him share in this Sunday morning buzzing energy. Hear him complain about the wait, feel his pockets for smokes, say “don’t give me that look” before stepping outside.

Write about a familiar place that felt altered after a major life event. Note the physical details—what’s new, missing, or altered—that demonstrate how the place, and therefore your life, has changed.

Bonus Prompt :

List odd, quirky, or everyday things you’d never have guessed you’d miss—things you might never see again but are, in their own way, happy reminders of what was special about that time. Alternatively, list things you’ll never miss. For example, stale hamburger buns, cracked lunch trays, and sitting alone in your high school cafeteria.

Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of the poetry collections  Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown , shortlisted for Jane’s Stories Press Foundation’s Clara Johnson Award in Women’s Literature, and  Diary of the One Swelling Sea , winner of a Nautilus Silver Award in Poetry, plus the chapbooks  Pendulum  and  Borderlines . Jill is the founder of Wandering Aengus Press and teaches Creative Writing for Skagit Valley College. Recent works can be found in  Slate ,  Fourth Genre ,  Waxwing ,  The Brooklyn Review ,  Gulf Stream ,  Diode , and  terrain.org . You can read more at  JillMcCabeJohnson.com/writing .

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Articles & Advice > Student Life > Articles

Homesick in College? How to Overcome That Sad, Missing Home Feeling

Everyone gets homesick their first year of college. Here are some ways you can manage your homesickness until you get to go home for your next break.

by Laura Wallace CollegeXpress Student Writer, Anderson University

Last Updated: Dec 19, 2023

Originally Posted: Sep 26, 2020

The transition to college is arguably the biggest change of your life—so far. You’re living away from home for the first time, adjusting to life with someone you barely know in a (very) close space, and starting over with your social circle. While the first week or two may feel like summer camp on steroids, once you get settled in, it’s not uncommon to feel homesick for your hometown, family, and high school friends. According to one survey , 66% of first-year college students experience severe homesickness. If you’re in that majority, here are some things you should know.

You are not alone

It can sometimes feel like everyone around you is having the time of their lives and not thinking about home at all, but you should know this isn’t the case. While some people adjust to huge transitions faster than others, the vast majority of students in your freshman class are missing home at least some of the time. Once you accept that other people are dealing with the same feelings you are, it’s easier to accept your own, deal with them, and move on.

Related: Video: Leaving Home for the First Time

Social media doesn’t tell the whole story

We’ve all heard this a million times before, but it’s true: social media is just a highlight reel of people’s lives and not the full story. It can be hard to look at posts of your high school friends with their new friends, appearing to have completely adjusted to college, but those posts don’t tell the whole story. They’re probably struggling just as much as you are—so try reaching out once in a while and see how they’re doing!   

Everyone deals with things differently

Just because your roommate never calls home doesn’t mean you can’t call home when you want to. We all deal with things in different ways, and homesickness is no exception. Some people are open to talking about their homesickness, while others aren’t comfortable with it. If your roommate is one of those people, don’t push them to help cope with your own feelings, but let them know you’re there in case they’ve been keeping their feelings bottled up too. 

It’s okay to seek help

The transition to college is arguably the biggest of your life. Being apart from your family and the life you’ve come to know and love can also exacerbate prior struggles with depression and anxiety . If you’re feeling consistently hopeless, sad, or upset, it may be a good idea to visit your school’s counseling center. Don’t feel ashamed if this is something you need to do; rather, be proud of yourself for working up the courage to find someone to help you address these problems. 

Related: Why It's Crucial to Care for Your Mental Health in College

Dealing with homesickness

Once you’ve accepted these facts about homesickness, here are some tips for healthy coping mechanisms to get you through until your first school break.

While texting is a viable option for staying close to your family, a phone call is so much more personal. Anuj Kalia, a college sophomore at North Carolina State University , advocates for freshmen to “talk to their parents and siblings often.” Remember that physically talking on the phone is more effective in quelling homesickness than texting because you can hear your loved ones’ voices. Sometimes just hearing your family rehash their typical day or telling you about the latest shenanigans of your pup will make you feel better.

However, be careful with this one. Calling home too much can work in reverse and make you miss it more—plus, you don’t want to miss out on making new friends and having fun on campus because you need to call home every night. For many people, calling for 15 minutes or less a couple times a week can be more beneficial than hours-long chats.

Write a letter home

Sending some snail mail is incredibly therapeutic. Plus, your mom will appreciate a handwritten letter from you about your recent activities and college life. In return, you just might get a care package, which—I can tell you from personal experience—is a wonderful gift.

Go home for a weekend

If the homesick blues have hit you hard and you’re not too far away, treat yourself and go home for a weekend. Sometimes sleeping in your own bed, eating a homecooked meal, and being back in a familiar place does wonders when it comes to recharging your batteries.

Related: 3 Tips to Maintain Healthy Family Relationships in College

Invite your family to visit you

The alternative to a weekend visit home is to invite your family to come see you . While you won’t receive all the comforts of home, you’ll be able to get big hugs and show your family around your new town and college campus. Their enthusiasm about your new place will increase yours. And chances are they’ll take you out for a nice dinner that doesn’t consist of cafeteria food!

Don’t give yourself too much free time

Beyond contact with your family, an important thing you can do to combat the blues is to avoid giving yourself too much unstructured time. When you have too much downtime on your hands, your thoughts can naturally drift to home, and you can end up feeling sorry for yourself instead of jumping into activities on campus. 

College is a whole new ballgame when it comes to time management—you have more control over your schedule than you did in high school, and it’s a learning curve to find the balance between overscheduling yourself and leaving too many free hours. If you find you have more hours than you know what to do with, you can always go to one of the many events your school offers or walk down the hall to find a new friend.

Establish a schedule

Beyond your class schedule, establish life patterns such as working out at a specific time or doing your laundry on Wednesdays. Settling into a routine will give you fewer choices to make on a daily basis, which can be exhausting. Also, if you have a special weekly routine that’s solely for you, such as getting a pastry on Saturday mornings, you’ll have more to look forward to throughout your week.  

Find “your spot” in your new setting

One reason going to college can be difficult to deal with is that everything is different and new. Establish yourself in your new town by locating a new go-to spot. Depending on your personality, this could be a specific coffee shop , a corner of the library, or a particular park near campus. You’ll feel more connected with the community around your school if you don’t just immediately return to your dorm whenever you have the chance.

Related:   5 Ways to Find Alone Time in College

Talk to an upperclassman

Finding someone a year or two older than you to talk with about your homesickness and adjustment to college life can be a lifesaver. They’re close enough to their own freshman year that they’ll remember how they coped with the same feelings that you’re going through and be able to offer valuable advice. They can also be an example to you of someone who came out on the other side of this massive mountain of going to college, which can be really encouraging for your own journey.

Take care of yourself

Our mood is highly affected by our health and habits. Without a parent there to tell you what to eat for dinner or when to go to bed, it can be easy to let your health sink to the bottom of your priority list. Getting enough sleep each night, consciously eating fruits and vegetables, and proactively seeking out opportunities for exercise will do wonders for your mood. When your body is happy, your mood will reflect that. 

Remember what you used to do to relax

In the flurry of arriving at college, you may have forgotten about the hobbies you dedicated yourself to before. Leaving that part of your life behind can bring an added layer of stress, but it doesn’t mean you have to give up on them. Anuj advises students to get involved with clubs that mirror their favored activities from high school. If you were involved in theater, try out for a play. If you were in a political group, consider continuing your affiliation at the collegiate level. Perhaps you played a specific sport? There are lots of club and intramural sports to choose from at college.

Whatever your hobby is, you can find a way to connect with it on your campus and get involved somewhere, at some level. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, it may be the perfect time to try something new. Having something to do beyond your classes will help occupy your mind and provide you with opportunities to make new friends . 

Look at the big picture

It’s okay to have rough days, and it’s totally understandable to want to go home at times—but this doesn’t mean you’re at the wrong college and should be looking to transfer next semester. Think back to the last time you started something totally new and how long it likely took you to get used to it. This is no different. Accept that there will be both good and bad days. And if all else fails, allow yourself time to be completely, miserably homesick. Eventually, you’ll remember how boring it is to just feel sorry for yourself all day. In the end, college should be a great experience—and you’re only wasting your own time by not enjoying it. When you’re ready, let the homesickness wash away, and go back to trying to make your college experience the best that it can be.

Video: Homesickness in college

Student vlogger Jordan-Paige has even more advice on how to combat homesickness. Check out her video below!  

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Looking for Home

How to answer when your elderly father asks, “Where do you live now?”

“Where do you live?” he asked. It was an important issue for my father—he asked me this same question every time we talked. “Where do you live now?” He knew I no longer lived with him and my mother, but he couldn’t seem to imagine me anywhere else.

I ran through the options in my head, trying to think of the best way to answer that might make him understand and remember. A street name was too specific. “I live in a small bungalow in south Minneapolis,” I replied.

He had been to my house many times since my husband and I bought it roughly two years before. Circulation problems and Alzheimer’s had turned my father into a shuffler, so he would hold my hand to negotiate the three steps from the walkway to our front door. Every time, he’d walk through the door onto our three-season porch and say, “I think I’ve been here before.” Then he’d stop, as if distracted by the surroundings, and take in the expanse of the small porch. I would stand at his side, trying to understand what his brain was telling him as I waited for him to orient himself. The bewilderment on his face turned into what I couldn’t call recognition, but rather, perhaps, comfort. Then he’d say, “Yep, I’ve been here before.”

“Yes, Dad, you’re right. You have,” I would say, smiling and perhaps allowing myself to feel happy for a few seconds as I pretended he really did remember. But as soon as he left, the memory of this home went with him, leaving me bereft as I watched my father slip away.

When we talked next, my father asked again, “Where do you live?” This time, I changed my tactic. I said, “I live in Minneapolis, by the Mississippi River.” The river is an enduring Minnesota landmark, but a landmark in my father’s life, as well. Many years earlier, after World War II displaced him, first, from his home in Yugoslavia and, then, from Germany, he crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a troop carrier to immigrate to the United States; the Mississippi made a path through the city where he first lived in this country: St. Paul. From his neighborhood in Dayton’s Bluff, on St. Paul’s east side, my father could look southwest, down the hill, and see the ribbon of the river—the iconic waterway of this new American home—winding its way past downtown.

The river’s headwaters are in the northwestern part of our state, as well—in Itasca State Park, where we took family camping trips. My father captured scenes of these trips with a home movie camera, filming his four young children running in and out of the water and splashing one another while our docile mother looked on. When I said Mississippi to my father, I hoped it would make him think of his history with the river, and with us.

“ Where do you live?” he asked again, even though I had just told him ten minutes earlier. I tried a different reference point: Minnehaha Falls Regional Park, where we’d spent family reunions with German relatives, the adults cooking bratwurst on the grill and drinking beer while we kids played on the nearby metal playground equipment. We’d peek over the stone wall at the Minnehaha Falls, wondering at the power of water and gravity.

The park wasn’t far from our first home in suburban Eagan, so we would go there other times, as well. My siblings and I played in the creek bed at the bottom of the falls, where the rushing water dissipated to a slow-moving creek feeding the mighty Mississippi. Watching nervously from the banks, my father cautioned us to be careful in the water.

“Where do you live?” my father wanted to know another time. He needed to place me in the world, to see where I fit and how that related to him. This time, I answered in terms of distance. “I live about fifteen miles from here, in south Minneapolis, near Highway 55.” Before Eagan turned into the expansive suburb it is today, one of the fastest ways to get to Minneapolis was by Highway 55, or Hiawatha Avenue.

We often took that route from my first home, a 1950s three-bedroom rambler, which my parents bought shortly after they were married in 1961. The house at 1069 McKee Street was in a small four-block development, each parallel block named after the developer and his family: Kenneth, Beatrice, McKee, and Keefe. The houses were all the same style, just different colors: forest green, melon, dark blue, sky blue, olive, white, brown.

The family quickly grew to fill the rooms: Heidi, then Karin, John, and finally me—four kids in four-and-a-half years. My father added on a family room and built a garage. Home was a nest from which we wandered untethered—riding bikes up and down the block; climbing the elm, pine, and apple trees in the yard; inventing games; and spending hours playing outside. Idyllic in so many ways. Looking back, I marvel at the freedom we had, but the bedrock of home was enough to draw us back time and again.

The place that will always be home to me is the split-level house in the newer, less developed part of our suburb, where we moved in 1977, when I was nine years old. It was thrilling to be in this larger home: each of us kids had our own bedroom; we had a big yard landscaped by Bachman’s nursery—something my father never would have fussed with or paid for; and beyond our property were prairies and ponds with plenty of places to explore. The streets were all named some variation of Greenleaf Drive—East, South, West, and North—except ours, which was the stolid Acorn Street.

Most of my childhood memories take place at that home on Acorn. It was where I learned to cook with my dad, where I watched him carefully plant and harvest his vegetable garden, where I learned to mow around the curvy flowerbeds, where we celebrated holidays and birthdays and ate dinner together nearly every day. It was the place where my father’s American dream came true—where he reaped the benefits of all his hard work—and where he lived out the rest of his life.

Long after my siblings and I had grown up and left home and had families of our own, my father would look around the house and ask my mom, “Where is everybody?” as if he expected all of his children to walk through the front door. It was in the very early stages of his Alzheimer’s, and one of the first clues that his grasp on reality was askew. Ever the watchful parent, he wouldn’t want to lock the door for the night, thinking one of us would still be coming home.

But toward the end, he often didn’t think he belonged there, either. In the quiet of the evening, after my parents had eaten supper or were getting ready to watch the ten o’clock news, he would say to my mother, “When are we going to go?”

“Where do you want to go?” she’d ask.

“Home!” he’d respond in exasperation, as if she should have known.

My mom was always stumped by this. “Where is home?” she would ask him. He didn’t know, but he was certain he wasn’t there.

My father’s legs grew weaker over time, and eventually, he used a wheelchair for longer outings. Strolling through my parents’ neighborhood one evening and pushing my dad in his chair, I commented on points of interest along the way: the lilies in bloom in a neighbor’s yard, the warm breeze of summer, or how much the trees had grown since our move to the neighborhood decades earlier. The area still had the quiet feel of a rural landscape. My father acknowledged everything I said with a simple, “Yes, I guess so.”

When I rounded the bend of their short block to return him home, my father pointed to his house on Acorn Street—the house where he’d lived for over thirty years—and said, “I used to live there.”

“You did?” I said, both alarmed and curious about his state of mind. “Where do you live now?”

“Oh, around,” he said. “Here and there.”

My spirits sank. How heartbreaking to be unable to place yourself in your past or even your present, not to know where you’ve been or where you’re going. Logically, I knew that Alzheimer’s was responsible for robbing my father of his sense of place, but emotionally, I couldn’t make sense of it.

My father’s “homeland” was an ocean away. He was born in a village in northern Yugoslavia. His German ancestors had moved there generations earlier, in search of a better livelihood. With the onset of World War II, tensions increased between ethnic Germans—known as Danube Swabians —and Yugoslavs, and many in the German community were forced out. At fourteen, my father moved on his own from Yugoslavia to Munich to become a baker’s apprentice during the war. I know a few of the places where he lived in Munich: a room above the bakery on Tulbeckstrasse, where he first worked; then a room in the Ledigenheim, a boarding house for men; and finally, a refugee camp in Bremen.

Perhaps it was this early isolation from family that affected how he thought of home. My father was eager for a new start in a new land—a place that hadn’t been wrecked by war. When he first came to the United States in 1952, my father joined family in east St. Paul. His Uncle Fritz had brought his wife and children there and found sponsors for my father, my two aunts, and my grandmother. My father was the first from his immediate family to come.

The house where my father lived with multiple relatives—up to twenty at one point—was an ordinary house in an ordinary American city. It was small, and it was crowded, but it was filled with enthusiasm and excitement. The household collectively cheered as someone got a new job, someone else arrived from Europe, or someone got engaged. These new immigrants were making their home together—finding work, organizing soccer games, drinking beer, and living—and it was a place of unending possibility. There, at last, my father found safety and joy.

All those years later, when he’d tell my mother he wanted to go home, she’d go over the places they had lived. When she finally asked about the St. Paul house, that’s where he wanted to go. That was home.

In the years before he died, my father couldn’t be left home alone, and I spent an increasing amount of time with him. One warm summer afternoon, as we sat peaceably on the deck, enjoying the trilling of birds and the shade from now full-grown trees, he told me again, “I used to live here.”

“You did?” I said. Time had muted the sting of it. “So did I.” After a second, I added, “I liked living here.”

We looked around, taking in the bucolic scene—the lush lawn, my mother’s roses in bloom, the sound of elm leaves fluttering in the wind, the small meadow beyond the fence. 

“Yeah, me too,” he said.

The fall collection is here 🍂

The Unimaginable Heartbreak of Losing Your Mom

• 5  Minute Read

To a girl, her mom is her first best friend. The person who teaches her what a woman should be. The first person to wipe her tears away when she is afraid or hurt. The first person to tell her how beautiful and special she is. To a girl, her mother is invincible.

One day, though, you learn your mom isn’t invincible after all. So, you stand there and tell her you love her and you will somehow be OK. You stand by her side while she takes her last breath, and then it hits you. You aren’t going to be OK.

In the days, weeks, and months that follow the death of your mother, you will feel a heartbreak like you cannot even imagine.

Think of your very worst break-up, multiply it by 100. That doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what you will feel.

You will be angry, so angry you find yourself shaking. You’ll cry until your head is pounding, your eyes are swollen shut, and your nose is so stuffy you can’t breathe. Then you’ll cry some more.

Food will lose its appeal, and the weight will fall off faster than you can buy new clothes. You might pick up old bad habits, anything to help numb the pain enough so you can sleep through the night.

RELATED: What It’s Like to Love a Motherless Daughter

Sleep won’t come, though — you will toss and turn for hours looking at old videos and pictures just so you can hear her voice or see her smile. One day you will be walking through a store and see someone who resembles your mom and your heart is going to sink to the floor. For just a second, you’ll forget she is gone. It will hurt, bad.

There will be times you pick up your phone to call her but stop after the first ring because it sinks in —s he’s not going to answer. In an effort to feel “normal,” you will go to familiar places she went to, listen to her favorite gospel hymns, you’ll even spray her perfume all over your pillow. It won’t help. You’ll find yourself screaming in anger, crying until you’re sick, and begging God to bring her back.

People will try to comfort you with the “right” words, but those words don’t exist. You will learn that some people you trusted and thought were friends will do things and say things that will make you lose trust. They think they are doing what is best, and they are. They do what is best for themselves, and you get to pick up what pieces you have left. Be very careful who you let into your heart in the first few months — you are extremely vulnerable. Any sense of love or comfort sounds good, but it can be deceiving.

Nobody will ever replace your mother — it simply is not possible.

Please, do not let anyone break your heart so soon after the death of a parent. It is better to be guarded than to be shattered again when you haven’t even begun to heal from your loss.

RELATED: To Those Who Know the Bitter Hurt of Losing a Parent

There are stages to grief, or at least that’s what is rumored. Grief doesn’t know it is supposed to come in stages though. Instead, it tears down your facade, wrecks your world, walks out casually, then returns hours later to do it all over again.

I wish I could say one day it is easier, that you wake up and feel whole again, but I can’t . You will wish you were dead at times not because you hate life but because you want so badly to see your mama again. You will push people away even though you love them deeply.

The thought of loving someone so much, of being so captivated by someone, only to have them ripped from you will take its toll on your heart and mind. Realizing you would rather be alone than ever feel so much heartache again is normal. Take the time to be alone if needed but don’t disappear. Somebody cares about you and is worried.

There will be days you can’t get out of bed. There will be days you don’t want to smile. All that is OK. Nobody can tell you what to feel, how you should feel, or how to handle your grief. If anyone does try to tell you how to grieve, punch them in the nose.

Having to experience holidays and birthdays without your mom will be one of the toughest parts. You will experience “happy” occasions that are almost impossible to push through without crying because she should be there. Missing your mom is something you will feel every moment of every day, even when you’re happy. You will be having a good time and all of a sudden wish she was there. All the emotions will flood you with a vengeance. That’s OK, too.

If your mother was anything like mine, she deserves to be missed. It’s hard to try and move forward with your life when your confidant, friend, biggest fan, and defender is gone. Remember, you are half her — her DNA is coursing through your veins. You will always miss her and wish she was here, she was your mom. Take time to feel the emotions and take time to miss her. You aren’t alone.

You aren’t the only one who feels lost.

You aren’t crazy for feeling incomplete. Let yourself find peace. Remember that she loved you with a pure, unwavering, and endless love. Take that love she showed you and share it with others. Make her love your legacy.

RELATED: Did My Mom Know How Much I Loved Her?

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Jessica Grillo

After suffering the loss of my sister and mother in March, I started writing about my personal journey through this lonely and brutal process . I found my voice, I found my truth , but most importantly I found healing in the words that were flowing from my soul.

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Jesus Weeps with Me

“Come on,” I said to myself, as I waited in the carpool line for my boys, “This is not a good time for a meltdown . . . get it together before they get into the car.”   I quickly wiped a tear away and pushed my sunglasses up on my face, as I simultaneously pushed back the flood of childhood memories running through my mind—memories of my brother and me swimming in the ocean with my dad when we were kids. We spent hours swimming and playing on the beach in Long Island where my grandparents lived. My dad...

My Kids Are Still Making Their Grandma Proud in Heaven

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Losing an Elderly Parent after a Long Life Still Stings

If you have lost an elderly parent, I bet people have said to you “at least he/she lived a good, long life” or “you were so lucky to have had him/her for so long.” You probably have even said this to yourself in an attempt to justify the event and diminish your grief, along with “it was a blessing” if they were suffering. I recently lost my dad. He was almost 88 years old, and I was almost 59. We had a very close and special relationship. I have no doubt the above statements that others tell us (and we...

When Grief and Postpartum Collide

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In Honor of Maria, Eat Cake for Breakfast

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Breast Cancer Cut Her Life Short but Her Legacy Lives On

In the photo, a radiant smile captures a moment frozen in time—a testament to the youth and mischievous spirit that defined my maternal grandmother. She remains a distant yet compelling figure in my life, her existence confined to the boundaries of a single photograph—a tangible relic of a vibrant soul, tragically taken by the relentless grip of breast cancer when my mother was merely a 9-year-old child. As I reflect upon the impact of breast cancer on my family, its lingering shadow casts a constant presence in my adult life. The annual ritual of undergoing mammograms has become a routine,...

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‘I found myself missing home’: A Utica photo essay

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Utica is a predominately African-American rural town with a population of 869, according to U.S. Census estimates, tucked away in the southwest corner of Hinds County. Also, a majority of the population is elderly and getting older. Abandoned businesses and other shuttered buildings occupy most of Main Street and are prevalent throughout the town.

Initiatives offered by groups such as Hope Credit Union, a community development financial institution, aim to bolsters economically distressed and low-wealth areas like Utica by providing residents with financial and other community services.

This photo essay explores Utica and its people, who symbolize the fight for the future of predominantly black rural areas throughout the South.

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by Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today June 9, 2018

This <a target="_blank" href="https://mississippitoday.org/2018/06/09/i-found-myself-missing-home-a-utica-photo-essay/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://mississippitoday.org">Mississippi Today</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/mississippitoday.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/MT_icon-logo-favicon-1.png?fit=134%2C150&amp;ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"><img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://mississippitoday.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=157167&amp;ga4=G-VSX4B701MS" style="width:1px;height:1px;">

Eric J. Shelton

Eric J. Shelton was a 2018 corps member in Report for America, and joined the team as our first photojournalist. A native of Columbia, Miss., Eric earned his bachelor’s in photojournalism from the University of Southern Mississippi. He was a multimedia journalist for Abilene Reporter-News, chief photographer for the Hattiesburg American and photo editor for the Killeen Daily Herald before joining our team June 2018. He rejoined Mississippi Today as our health photojournalist in January 2022.

Home — Essay Samples — Life — House — What Does Home Mean to You

What Does Home Mean to You

• Categories: Hometown House Positive Psychology

About this sample

Words: 1251 |

Updated: 6 November, 2023

Words: 1251 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

“What I love most about my home is who I share it with.” “There is nothing more important than a good, safe, secure home.” “Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.”

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Works Cited

• Bachelard, G. (1994). The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press.
• Boyd, H. W., & Ray, M. J. (Eds.). (2019). Home and Identity in Late Life: International Perspectives. Policy Press.
• Casey, E. S. (2000). Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Indiana University Press.
• Clark, C., & Murrell, S. A. (Eds.). (2008). Laughter, Pain, and Wonder: Shakespeare's Comedies and the Audience in the Playhouse. University of Delaware Press.
• Heidegger, M. (2010). Building, Dwelling, Thinking. In Poetry, Language, Thought (pp. 145-161). Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
• Kusenbach, M. (2003). Street Phenomenology: The Go-Along as Ethnographic Research Tool. Ethnography, 4(3), 455-485.
• Moore, L. J. (2000). Space, Text, and Gender: An Anthropological Study of the Marakwet of Kenya. Routledge.
• Rapport, N., & Dawson, A. (Eds.). (1998). Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement. Berg Publishers.
• Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.
• Seamon, D. (Ed.). (2015). Place Attachment and Phenomenology: The Synergistic Dynamism of Place. Routledge.

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My childhood home became my world during the pandemic. Then, we moved

When I first moved away from home and into my college dorm, my family bought a new couch.

They replaced our brown, well-worn leather sofa with a tan sectional, featuring cupholders and a reclining option for every family member — even a corner for the dog. Then, they fostered a puppy. He was young and hyperactive and antagonized our dog by jumping on his back and stealing his bed.

I thought our house — a place I had called home my entire life — couldn’t have changed any more than that. But in March 2020, I moved back home because of the coronavirus pandemic .

And then, in what had already become an upside-down world, we moved out of my childhood home altogether.

A house full of memories

My parents moved into our white house with hunter green doors and matching shutters right after it was built in 1999. It was a new neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina, with one main street lined with tract houses, each with a square plot of land out front marked with a tree. As I grew up, so did the neighborhood, expanding into the community that it is today.

That house was where I first met my two younger brothers after they were taken home from the hospital. It’s where we all learned to walk, watched “The Wiggles” for hours on end and memorized multiplication tables. At that kitchen table, I was told about my mom’s pregnancy, the marriage of my aunt and the death of grandparents. Every monumental event in my life was rooted to that house.

My move back home mid-sophomore year became yet another defining experience tied to that physical space.

The pandemic transformed my house into my entire world. With local stay-at-home orders, there was nowhere else to go. My desk became my classroom, and, later that summer, it served as my newsroom during my first journalism internship. Our kitchen table became part office, part co-working space. The playroom turned into a dorm lounge, where I would talk with my brothers and sometimes join them for a video game when the boredom really sunk in.

And my favorite place of all, our living room, turned into our movie theater as we watched a full lineup of shows and movies each night, starting with “Jeopardy!” and usually ending with a rerun of “The Office.”

Nostalgia was a comforting emotion to surround myself with. The past was fixed. And the future had never been more uncertain.

Our house was well lived in. Closets overflowed, our attic was full, and in every drawer, you could find old crayons, a lost pair of scissors and a drawing from someone’s elementary school art class. I didn’t like to throw things away. What if I needed it one day? Every nook and cranny was occupied by something, and even if it seemed like we didn’t have enough room, we’d make some.

My parents had always said we would move one day. But it was always one of those far-off notions — something that may happen someday but not anytime soon.

But when our house became our whole world and our weekends were limited to entertainment inside, my parents started taking on home improvement projects. We repainted my room from neon turquoise to a neutral beige. We fixed the doorknob-shaped hole in our playroom wall and painted over the crayon drawings hidden in our old playroom. I remember having a passing thought that maybe it was all done just so we could live more comfortably here.

But I soon found out the reality: We were getting it ready to sell it.

Uprooting — fueled in large part by remote work — has become a part of the pandemic narrative. Data from the United States Postal Service shows that in 2020, more than 7 million households moved to a different county as many people moved from big cities to the suburbs, an increase of half a million compared to 2019. But the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University found that these upticks in early and late 2020 did not represent "a significant change from prior years in the total number of moves."

Whatever trend the data ultimately end up validating, my family's move was just one of many during remarkably unsettling times.

Growing up, I liked the idea of moving. It always sounded exciting. Anytime a new student joined my class, I would pepper them with questions: How did you pack everything? How could you carry it? How did your furniture fit through doors?

But in June 2020, my parents told us over dinner that we were officially selling the house. It was finally my turn to go through the excitement of a big move, but I felt more like a child forced to part with her security blanket.

During the early days of the pandemic, my friends and I joked that we had regressed. I started re-watching my favorite show from high school, “The Vampire Diaries,” and reread every single “Percy Jackson” book, including the spinoff series. I forced my brothers to play old board games like the Game of Life, Trouble and Sorry with me. Nostalgia was a comforting emotion to surround myself with. The past was fixed. And the future had never been more uncertain.

So the idea of packing everything up and moving into a new space gave me a feeling of grief for the 20 years I had spent there. I’d never again look out my window and see the view of our empty backyard, which had been occupied by a play set and then a trampoline at various times in my life. I’d miss running in our neighborhood’s perfect loop or walking my dog on his favorite route. And I’d miss being able to lean over the railing of the second story to have a conversation with my family downstairs.

For (my brothers), the new house looked like a brand new playground. To me, I felt like I was finally leaving one.

My family moved just as Charlotte was entering a hot seller's market, mirroring a real estate trend seen across the country. By the end of 2020, inventory in the city shrank 28.4% and sales increased by 8.5%, leading to a 32% decrease in the supply of homes, according to the Charlotte Business Journal .

In a sign of the times — with many buyers waiving contingencies and home inspections — the family who bought our old house wrote my parents a letter when they submitted an offer, expressing their vision of raising their two young children there. It felt like we were passing our house down to a family with kids who would grow up there, just like my brothers and I had.

My parents bought a house about 10 minutes away, and we were set to move the first week of August. This coincided with the last week of my summer internship and was exactly one week before I was set to move back to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to start my junior year of college. 

Packing was the worst part. I tried to keep everything organized, but as I continued to put off the task, I ended up throwing everything into brown boxes, refusing to think about the experience of unpacking it all.

On the last day, everything was bare. The furniture was gone, the closets were empty and it didn’t even look like a home anymore. My best friend came over to help me move the essentials, and so she could get one last look at the house that was the backdrop of our friendship.

I recorded a video while walking through each of the rooms. I remember being so terrified that I’d forget what it looked like. I took a picture with my parents in front of our green door. I’m smiling, but there are tears on my cheeks.

I took a picture with my parents in front of our green door. I’m smiling, but there are tears on my cheeks.

Moving into the new house was a blur. Breaking news meant that I was constantly glued to my computer as the university desk editor of The Daily Tar Heel, and I barely looked up to notice what the new house looked like. My room remained filled with boxes, with just a desk for work and a bed to sleep in. I’ll unpack later, I remember telling myself.

My brothers were ecstatic about the move. The new house meant more space and a flat driveway, so they could finally set up a basketball hoop outside. For them, the new house looked like a brand new playground. To me, I felt like I was finally leaving one.

But then I moved into my first college apartment the next week. And it wasn’t until winter break that I finally went back home. I told myself that I was too busy to visit, which was true. But there was a part of me that worried that “going home” just wouldn’t feel like being home.

Making a house a home

Due to the pandemic, our winter break that year was long, almost double its normal length. When I got home, the room I had left, sparse and filled with cardboard boxes, was gone. My mom had unpacked everything, even down to setting up my bookshelf and filling it. She found a painting of a blue flower at Home Goods and hung it behind my bed. She put old canvases I had made on the opposite walls and turned the room into something comfortable.

But I didn’t see the physical space. What I saw was my mother’s love and care, wanting to make sure that this new house wasn’t just my family’s home, but mine as well. She always says her favorite times are when we are all under the same roof.

And I realized that’s why I loved my old house so much. Because it marked the place where we all sheltered together in one space, just a few feet away from each other. College took that away. Then a pandemic gave it back. And I perceived moving as taking it away again.

Over that break, I started my first book stack right beside my bed — the first of many. I hung up pictures on the wall and organized my shelves. I moved my desk and ordered my clothes by style, the way I like it.

It marked the first change toward becoming my room in the new house — the house that kept my family together under one roof, and the place I can always come home to.

Maddie Ellis is a weekend editor at TODAY Digital.

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Essays About Home: Top 5 Examples and 7 Writing Prompts

Writing essays about home depicts familial encounters that influence our identity. Discover our guide with examples and prompts to assist you with your next essay.

The literal meaning of home is a place where you live. It’s also called a domicile where people permanently reside, but today, people have different definitions for it. A home is where we most feel comfortable. It’s a haven, a refuge that provides security and protects us without judgment. 

Parents or guardians do their best to make a home for their children. They strive to offer their kids a stable environment so they can grow into wonderful adults. Dissecting what a home needs to ensure a family member feels safe is a vital part of writing essays about home.

5 Essay Examples

1. the unique feeling of home by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 2. where i call home by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 3. a place i call home by anonymous on toppr.com, 4. the meaning of home by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 5. what makes a house a home for me by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. true meaning of home, 2. the difference between a home and a house, 3. homes and emotions, 4. making our house feel like home, 6. home as a vital part of our lives, 7. a home for a kid.

“Nowadays, as I moved out, the place feels alien since I spend the whole time in the house during my visits to my parents. They treat me like a guest in their home – in a good sense; they try to be attentive to me and induce dialogue since I stay there for a short time, and they want to extract the maximum of their need for interaction with me.”

In this essay, a visit to the author’s parents’ house made them realize the many things they missed. They also can’t help but compare it to their current home. The writer states family conflict as the reason for their moving out and realizes how fast they adapted to their new environment. 

Returning to their childhood home brings out mixed emotions as they ponder over the lasting influence of their past on their present personality. The author recognizes the importance of the experiences they carry wherever they go. In the end, the writer says that a home is anywhere they can belong to themselves and interact with those they hold dear. You might be interested in these essays about city life .

“The noteworthy places where I lived are the places I have made my home: where I can walk around with a birds’ nest on my head and a pair of old sweatpants in the middle of summer, where I can strip myself bear of superficial emotions…”

The essay starts with vivid descriptions of the author’s home, letting the reader feel like they are in the same place as the narrator. The author also considers their grandmother’s and friend’s houses his home and shares why they feel this way. 

“My home is important to me because for better or worse, it helps me belong. It makes me understand my place in time and connect with the world and the universe at large. Thus, I am grateful to have a place I can call home.”

In this essay, the author is straightforward in sharing the features of their home life, including where their house is located, who lives in it, and other specific details that make it a home. It’s an ancestral home with vintage furniture that stands strong despite age. 

The writer boasts of their unrestricted use of the rooms and how they love every part of it. However, their best memories are linked to the house’s terrace, where their family frequently spends time together.

Looking for more? Check out these essays about dream house .

“Home is a word that means a lot in the life of every person. For some, this is a place to come after hard work to relax and feel comfortable. For others, this is a kind of intermediate point from which they can set off towards adventure.”

A home is where a person spends most of their life, but in this essay, the writer explains that the definition varies per an individual’s outlook. Thus, the piece incorporates various definitions and concepts from other writers. One of them is Veronica Greenwood , who associates homes with a steaming bowl of ramen because both provide warmth, comfort, and tranquility. The author concludes by recognizing individuals’ ever-changing feelings and emotions and how these changes affect their perception of the concept of a home.

“It is where the soul is…  what makes my house a home is walking through the front door on a Friday evening after praying Zuhr prayer in the masjid and coming back to the aroma of freshly cooked delicious biryani in the kitchen because my mom knows it’s my favorite meal.”

This essay reflects on the factors that shape a house to become a home. These factors include providing security, happiness, and comfort. The author explains that routine household activities such as cooking at home, watching children, and playing games significantly contribute to how a home is created. In the end, the writer says that a house becomes a home when you produce special memories with the people you love.

7 Prompts for Essays About Home

The definition of a home varies depending on one’s perspective. Use this prompt to discuss what the word “home” means to you. Perhaps home is filled with memories, sentimental items, or cozy decor, or maybe home is simply where your family is. Write a personal essay with your experiences and add the fond memories you have with your family home.

Check out our guide on how to write a personal essay .

Home and house are two different terms with deeper meanings. However, they are used interchangeably in verbal and written communication. A house is defined as a structure existing in the physical sense. Meanwhile, a home is where people feel like they belong and are free to be themselves.

In your essay, compare and contrast these words and discuss if they have the same meaning or not. Add some fun to your writing by interviewing people to gather opinions on the difference between these two words.

The emotions that we associate with our home can be influenced by our upbringing. In this essay, discuss how your childhood shaped how you view your home and include the reasons why. Split this essay into sections, each new section describing a different memory in your house. Make sure to include personal experiences and examples to support your feelings.

For example, if you grew up in a home that you associate positive memories with, you will have a happy and peaceful association with your home. However, if your upbringing had many challenging and stressful times, you may have negative emotions tied to the home.

The people inside our home play a significant role in how a house becomes a home. Parents, siblings, and pets are only some of those that influence a home. In this prompt, write about the items in your home, the people, and the activities that have made your house a home.

Describe your home in detail to make the readers understand your home life. Talk about the physical characteristics of your house, what the people you live with make you feel, and what you look forward to every time you visit your home. You can also compare it to your current home. For example, you can focus your essay on the differences between your childhood home and the place you moved in to start your independent life.

Home is the one place we always go back to; even if we visit other places, our home is waiting for our return. In this prompt, provide relevant statistics about how much time a person spends at home and ensure to consider relevant factors such as their profession and age group. Using these statistics, explain the importance of a home to the general population, including the indications of homelessness.

There are 135,000 children adopted in the US each year. These children become orphans for various reasons and are adopted by their guardians to support and guide them through life. For this prompt, find statistics showing the number of unaccompanied and homeless children.

Then, write down the government programs and organizations that aim to help these kids. In the later part of your essay, you can discuss tips on how a foster family can make their foster kids feel at home. For help picking your next essay topic, check out our 20 engaging essay topics about family .

Writing your Lost and Found Story

by Laura Hedgecock | May 13, 2016 | Memories , How-to , Journal writing , Writing and Sharing Memories | 2 comments

What’s your lost and found story?

“How could we have lost something so precious?” my friend lamented to her husband. Dusk approached. She, her husband, and various friends had searched throughout much of the previous night and all that day for their elderly little dog that had wandered off.  Her grief is universal. We all have at least one major lost and found story.

Perhaps it’s a lost object that still sticks in your craw. Perhaps you’ve had an experience analogous to the finding the prodigal son. Perhaps, like my friend, the not knowing, not understanding what happened, that keeps you up at night.

Writing about things lost and found

Whether there’s a happy ending or not, stories of things lost or lost and found make compelling narratives. In fact, such stories are easy to find all over the Internet.

I have my own. For instance, the 10 interminable minutes during which my then 5-year old was missing at the Salt Lake City airport. I can still remember the panic I felt and the way that I wanted to strangle the slow-to-take-it seriously airport security guard.

Elements of your lost and found story:

• What went missing? (duh) Object, person, pet, or other.  It may have simply disappeared or was stolen.  Wallet, military metal, vacation or wedding pictures all come to mind, but you can take a creative twist on this topic.  One example is Kannaki’s “My Mother’s Shoes .”
• Why did it matter to you? This could be obvious, such as in the case of a five-year-old, but it isn’t always. Perhaps the crucifix that went missing had been passed down from your grandmother, a life-long devoted Catholic. Perhaps it had brought you comfort on numerous occasions.
• How did you discover it (he or she) was missing? The setting, the foreshadowing, the explanation of why a person or object mattered so much all contribute to a compelling story.
• How did you feel about it at the time? What was your state of mind? In the case of my friend, her word choices are telling.  The rest of us consider her little dog as “gone missing.” We use a blameless phrase. Repeatedly, I’ve heard her say, “I lost my little dog.” She’s shouldering the responsibility, way more than she should.  What happened in your story? Did you feel responsible? Victimized?
• What measures did you take? Posters? Letters? Flyers? A reward? Turning the house upside down?
• Who helped you search? Were they actually helpful? I can’t help remembering that security guard blithely pointing out every young boy in sight.  “Is that him?”  “What about that child?”  Me yelling, “Get on your radio!  None of these children are wearing a dark blue shirt with a rhino on it!”
• How did the story turn out? Of course you have to share the outcome. But that doesn’t have to be the way the story ends.  Instead, you can talk about silver linings, what you learned, any insight that might be applicable to the rest of your life.
• How do you feel looking back? We can often reconcile ourselves to events only after time has passed.  For instance, after my parents died, my sister and I were never able to locate my father’s wedding ring, which he kept on his key-chain.  It used to keep me up at night, wondering what clever hiding place he thought he’d found shortly before he took his trip. But over time, hope has diminished. After all, it was a material thing. I’ve made an uneasy peace with the loss.

What about you? What your lost and found story? How have you told it? How have you shared it?

Graphic: Background image courtesy of Pixabay.com user anneileino , CC0.

What a can of worms you have opened! I am sure we all have so many stories. But yesterday I went and met an old friend who has lost his mind to dementia. To see this man reduced to how I found him was absolutely heartbreaking. There can be no finding it again – just a release from this life. I never thought I would wish him dead. 😢

You’re right. I didn’t even go in to the intangibles such as losing innocence, faith, sanity, and things like that. Those are truly heartbreaking to watch–but maybe cathartic to write about. I’m sorry about your old friend. That’s so hard. Thanks for commenting!

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The Meaning of Home Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Home is a word that means a lot in the life of every person. For some, this is a place to come after hard work to relax and feel comfortable. For others, this is a kind of intermediate point from which they can set off towards adventure. Still, others believe that the home is not some specific place but where the closest and dearest people gather. However, everyone’s life should have a home as a place to reboot, energize and comfort. This allows people to stay afloat even in the most challenging times and know that there is a safe corner in this world where they can ride out the storm.

Various authors put different emotions and thoughts into the concept of home. For example, Joan Didion (1967) has a particular view of the concept of home. She believes that home is the place where her closest and dearest people are. She loves to visit her family to feel a sense of unity and be close to loved ones. In this house, time seems to slow down, and no matter what happens in life, home is always a place where she can meet people that are ready to support and understand her. This view of a home is quite common: “home is where the heart is.”

Having close people is an integral part of everyone’s life, even from a biological perspective. People need to feel like they belong to a specific group to always be able to receive support. In addition, no matter how the family criticizes us, it still accepts us with all the shortcomings and rash actions. We are part of a family, so it will be difficult to “break away” from it. However, it is necessary to remember that this is a two-way communication and maintain it. Not only seek help from relatives in difficult times but also help them if necessary. This is what will help build a secure family-related feeling of “home.”

Some people associate home with warm memories of the past, while in the present, this concept becomes, perhaps, more blurred. For example, for Veronique Greenwood (2014), the home was strongly associated with a warm, steaming bowl of ramen. Every day at school, she skipped lunch to read more books and came home in the late afternoon. Hunger “overtook” her, and every day she saved herself by making herself a bowl of hot ramen soup. She began to associate this warmth and satiety with a feeling of calmness, security, and comfort – at home.

No matter how hard life is, some people may indeed have some tiny detail that becomes reliable support. Thus, for example, a warm soup is one of the few things that could support the girl. However, it helped her survive all the difficulties of adolescence. She knew she had a home, a place filled with warmth and comfort. Thanks to this support, she was able to find her place in life and grow up as a worthy person.

Pico Iyer (2013) reveals an exciting and unusual vision of the home in his speech. He argues that the home cannot be a specific point on the map for many people since people and their lives are constantly changing. For some, the parental house becomes home; for others – a favorite place to travel; for some – a country to which they dream of moving all their lives. People collect the concept of a home throughout their lives, and it becomes a mosaic made up of diverse parts that are unique to everyone.

As a result, the home becomes not what is at a certain point on the map but what leaves the greatest response in the soul. Each person’s experience is unique, so everyone has an unusual and unique feeling of home in their hearts. Thanks to this, we recognize the most important places, events, and people in our life. It is what becomes our “home” that forms the basis of our personalities and influences us.

For me, the concept of “home” is now most closely related to the idea of the parental home. My family lives there, and I feel our closeness; I understand that I can always get help, support, and care in this place. I know that the most comfortable atmosphere of trust and warmth is there. However, I understand that my thoughts and feelings about the concept of home can change dramatically over time. For example, if I move to another city or start my own family, I will feel this concept differently. However, I know that my family’s home will always remain dear to me; that is, it will still be an essential component of the concept of “home.” Therefore, you must always carefully listen to yourself, look for your home, and collect it bit by bit from different parts of life. This will help you feel calmer and know that in some place, someone is waiting for you with love and support.

Didion, J. (1967). On going home.

Greenwood, V. (2014). How ramen got me through adolescence . The New York Times Magazine. Web.

Iyer, P. (2013). Where is home? [Video]. TED. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, October 22). The Meaning of Home. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-meaning-of-home/

"The Meaning of Home." IvyPanda , 22 Oct. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-meaning-of-home/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'The Meaning of Home'. 22 October.

IvyPanda . 2022. "The Meaning of Home." October 22, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-meaning-of-home/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Meaning of Home." October 22, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-meaning-of-home/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Meaning of Home." October 22, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-meaning-of-home/.