No place like home

There are a lot of often-quoted sayings about “home”, often sappy or mawkish, but nevertheless revealing, at least, of how people feel about the idea of home, or their perception of it. Among those sayings is, “there’s no place like home”, and whether we click the heels of our ruby slippers three times or not, we may find out that it may connect us to something very different than what we imagined. That’s something I now understand very, very well.

The way most people take the saying is as a sort of declaration that the place they consider “home” is the best place on the planet, and to such people it probably is. But there’s another, more sombre way of taking the phrase: That there’s no place that’s like home—or, more simply, no place IS home.

People may feel that they have no home for many reasons, and the feeling may be a temporary or permanent. It can be caused by physical displacement (by natural disaster, famine, war, etc.), by abuse, or any number of terrible things. There’s one more personal terrible thing, I’ve learned, that cause us to feel disconnected from the concept of “home”, and that’s profound grief.

For 24 years, my home wasn’t really a physical place—after all, Nigel and I lived in five different houses in three completely different areas in New Zealand. Instead, for me, “home” was wherever Nigel and our furbabies were. That began to unravel when Nigel died.

In the first year, I wondered constantly about my literal place in the world, something that wasn’t helped by lockdowns and other Covid restrictions. Then Sunny died, then Jake died, and Leo and I had to carry on as a duo—against a backdrop of even more lockdowns and Covid restrictions.

It’s no surprise, really, that with two years of massive changes and upheavals I began to feel I wasn’t connected to any physical place: My family of six had been my home, but Leo and I were all that was left. At the beginning, my question had been “what now?!”, but after all those changes and challenges it became something more like, “where now?!”

It’s not that I thought there was a specific place on the planet where I might feel at home, though in daydream-like thoughts I sometimes imagined Leo and me in places all over the world. Mostly they were just idle thoughts, and actually far less consequential than an actual daydream, but through that I came to realise that there’s no physical place that feels like home to me—it turns out that, for me, there’s no place that’s like any home.

This is the point in the story where I should talk about my breakthrough moment, how I solved the existential—or, residential—dilemma, but I can’t do that because it hasn’t happened, at least, not yet. For all I know, it may never happen, and this feeling may remain with me for the rest of my life. Or not. I have no idea what will happen.

This reality has made me matter-of-fact (in my description) about where I live: “Does this place suit me right now?” When I ask that question of myself, if the answer is even a lukewarm “yes”, or even just a shrug of the shoulders, then that’s good enough. If that changes, I might go somewhere else. Or not: The universe may prefer to move toward disorder, but we humans seem reluctant to break up whatever order we’ve achieved in the hope of a better stasis somewhere else. And, of course, after three years of upheaval and negative changes, I want—I need—to rest, to regroup, to recharge my batteries, all of that, and this house, and Hamilton generally, is as good a place for that as any.

However, none of that changes the fact that in a sense I don’t feel connected to the planet because I don’t feel connected to any place on it: I have no “home”, I have a house that Leo allows me to share with him. While I’m (mostly) joking about that sharing bit, it’s nevertheless true that as the last of our family, Leo and I being together is as close as I get to feeling a sense of “home”, and that’s still not about geography (and this is now the sixth house and fourth area of New Zealand that I’ve lived in).

What this means in practical terms is that while I (theoretically) could live anywhere in the world, in reality there’s no particular place I want to live. And so, the place I’m—we’re—living right now is quite literally as good as any other—and, to be fair, far better than most.

Whether my reality changes, and if so, when or how, will depend on a long list of things, many of which are outside my control (like the real estate market and the cost of living, for example). Some of it will also depend on the course of my journey and the building of my new normal. I think, or maybe hope, that as I work out who and what I am now, everything else will fall into place, too. If so, maybe I’ll also feel something when I think of home, because it’s never really been about a specific place for me, but maybe even that could change.

Still, for me, there’s no place that IS home. For now.

I originally created the graphic above for a 2007 blog post .