The first time I went back into my Nana’s house, I panicked. She was still alive then, but in a nursing home and not doing well—and already, the house felt empty. Not just physically, but spiritually. The warmth was gone. The light had changed. It didn’t feel like her house anymore.
Everything was in transition—boxes stacked to the ceiling, drawers half-open, rooms in the middle of being sorted and packed by my uncles as they prepared to sell the house. It felt like a hollowed-out version of what used to be sacred ground. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t stay.
So I grabbed what I could. Two coffee mugs with my own photograph on them—those cringy center-of-the-mall kiosk gifts from the ’90s—and a small broken table fountain. All things I had given her over the years. Things that had sat quietly in her space, collecting her energy. I shoved them into a grocery bag like I was looting my own childhood.
I thought that I was ready. I thought I could be practical and sort through a few things, maybe feel a sense of connection. Instead, I stood there with my heart in my throat, suddenly ten years old again, looking for Nana in a home that had already started to forget her.
Her presence used to live in every inch of that house. In the scent of her lotion. In the way the dining room light hit the table where she played cards. In the hum of baseball on the TV and the faint clink of pills in her organizer. Now all of that was gone. Or hiding. Or drowned out by the noise of transition.
I used to color there. For hours. I’d sit at the table with a fistful of crayons and lose myself in paper princesses and Mickey Mouse, while Nana made soup or folded laundry or just sat nearby. It was one of the few places I didn’t feel like I had to earn love. I could just exist.
She even let me into her bedroom—her quiet, grown-up space—and never blinked when I played with her makeup, her jewelry, her perfumes. I’d smear on blue eyeshadow, clip on her earrings, dab too much of Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds somewhere between my ears and my wrists, and parade around like I was the star of my own one-woman fashion show. She never told me I was being silly. She just let me be.
We played cards too. Blitz, mostly. She always beat me, always laughed when I got too competitive, always pretended not to notice when I tried to cheat. That house was my refuge. My safe house. When things got loud or tense or unbearable at home, I escaped there. Nana’s was the place where nothing exploded. Where people didn’t yell. Where I could breathe.
And it wasn’t just me. There were other kids in the neighborhood. We’d run wild through the backyards, darting in and out of each other’s houses like feral little joy-seekers, grabbing popsicles, guzzling glasses of cold water, our feet filthy from the sidewalk and our skin sticky from the sun and lack of air conditioning. Nana never minded.
That version of me, me the barefoot, sunburned, card-cheating little girl—she lived in that house too. And it feels like she died a little when Nana left it. Or maybe she disappeared the moment I walked in and realized the house didn’t recognize me anymore.
Grief is weird like that. It doesn’t wait for the official moment. Sometimes it starts early, in quiet dread and slow goodbyes. It’s not just about losing the person. It’s about losing the world they built around you. The routines. The safety nets. The corners of your life that only made sense because they were in them.
Now she’s really gone. And it’s everything and nothing all at once.
I’m not the one handling the estate. My uncles are taking care of the house, her things, and the logistics of loss. I wasn’t there to sort or decide. I was just there to grab a few pieces of her before they disappeared into dumpsters and boxes and trucks and paperwork.
Just something to remind me.
The mugs I gave her. That broken little fountain. A few quiet items that held her hands, her habits, her memory. And when I see them, I’ll still remember the woman who let me be a kid when I didn’t feel safe to be one anywhere else. The one who kept her house warm and her freezer full of popsicles. The one who never made me feel like too much, or not enough.
She’s gone. But I still have pieces.