I have a theory that there is a ghost in the house I grew up in. It’s not a scary ghost that lives to haunt, but a benevolent entity that loves to play tricks. My house ghost has a penchant for stealing, making you wonder how the object you had on your person mere seconds ago has somehow vanished. The items always turned up later, underneath couches or beds.
I just moved out of my childhood home in Mississauga and left my ghost behind. A few weeks ago, it stole one of my slippers and I couldn’t help but think that the ghost wanted to keep a piece of me. Because as much as that house built me, my family built that house.
I have been thinking a lot about the meaning of home. Not only because I left the one I grew up in, but also because I have lived more places in the last year than I have in the previous decade. I lived in Edwards Hall in my first year and have spent the school year in a student house. I have wrestled with the question of where to call my home base. Is it the place where I spend the majority of my nights? The place where the people I love the most are? The place that challenges me? The place that comforts me?
My adulthood up until this point has been the loss of constants. Schedules that change from week to week. Different places to lay my head. I feel nomadic sometimes, always living half in and out of a suitcase. I’m always leaving somewhere soon, whether by the end of the day, week, month or year.
I am picky about what I call “home.” I don’t like to say “let’s go home” on vacation because we’re returning to a generic hotel room, not a place where I have grown and changed. I called Edwards Hall “Eddy” instead of home. I call my student house “the house.” But I’ve been thinking lately that maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I don’t need to discriminate between homes and houses, because even if a place doesn’t change me, I changed it.
Shortly before I moved out of Edwards Hall, I discovered the names of past residents written on the wall above the bed. Before I left, I added my name. I forgot my over-the-door hook in the room and now someone else probably uses it.
And there are others that left a mark. The residents that wrote “Traphouse 5” under the room number. Whoever broke my closet hook. The people whose push pins left holes in the corkboard. Those responsible for the nicks in the desk.
We leave marks wherever we go. My housemates and I turned a trashed student house into a semblance of a cozy space. When I leave my room, I might leave the curtains behind, or at least the rod. I am the person who chose pink for the walls.
In my childhood home, we left marks too. I made the hole in the basement wall. We changed flooring and light switches, put in shelving and backsplash and bushes. We tore out all the grass on the property. My father built the deck. My mother picked the bright colours with which she painted the walls. Despite the repaint, you could still see the reds and yellows where the ceiling meets the wall.
But I think there are other, invisible ways that we change the spaces we occupy. There is a legacy that we leave with the way we moved, the way we loved, the way we hated. Maybe the friendship that my roommate and I formed in Edwards Hall blessed this year’s occupants. Maybe the laughter of my housemates and I will echo there when we’re gone. Maybe my family’s undying love for one another will make my childhood home a happy one for the young family that moved in.
I would be naïve to exclude the bad. Maybe unkind words whispered behind backs, fights, disagreements, lack of communication — maybe that strains a home, makes it weary and old. Maybe the tears shed when hearts are heavy makes the roof sag. Maybe the lives mourned makes the floors creak.
However, it is more than just houses. It is streets and cities. The wear on the sidewalks from all the times my sister and I walked to 7-11 for Slurpees. The words swirling in the air as I wrote bad poetry at my elementary school bus stop. My fingerprints on the Mississauga city buses I don’t ride anymore. The pennies I’ve thrown in mall fountains. Our memories change spaces.
I have spent the last seven months writing about the artists, entrepreneurs and activists in Hamilton. Before I got to do this work, I would have never even suggested that Hamilton was home. But now I know its art and its culture. Now that I have left a record that won’t be erased, I would be remiss to say it isn’t a home.
Even when I graduate and don’t have to be in Hamilton, I’ll come back. To grab a patty from Jamaican Patty Shack, for a tarot reading at Witch’s Fix, or to attend a Denoire Collective event.
When the year begins, we talk a lot about how McMaster and Hamilton will become home for us over time. For some people, that is true and for others, it is not. But if you want to claim this campus or this city as your own, know that it’s yours. You changed it because you were here.
As the school year comes to a close, many of us will be leaving places; our residences, our student houses, our campus, this city. Our childhood homes for smaller homes, our permanent houses for hotel rooms. In transit, it is easy to feel like you have no base, no where that you belong to. But the ghosts that keep parts of you will remember you were there.
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Sarah O’Connor / Silhouette Staff
Last weekend, my eighty-seven year old grandfather died. He had been in St. Joseph’s for a month and after fluctuating from dialysis to getting off dialysis, from possibly coming home to never coming home, and he finally passed away. He wasn’t suffering anymore. His breathing stopped first, his heart soon followed.
My grandpa always read my articles in The Silhouette. When I told him in September that I would be writing for my University’s paper, he asked me to bring two papers each week I saw him. One for him, one for me. After reading my first article, it was my grandpa who said, “This is what you’re going to be doing for the rest of your life.”
He was a World War Two veteran – he helped liberate Holland. But this wasn’t something he bragged about. It was something we knew as a family, something we were immensely proud of. Every Remembrance Day, he would show us his war medals and tell us war stories. He always seemed so strong.
The war was in the past, but it was one day when he came for dinner with a troubled mind that he told my dad, “Some days, the war doesn’t leave you.”
He was alone for a long time. My Nana, his wife, passed away ten years earlier, and while he had his children and grandchildren, he missed her, and I know it was hard for him to live without her. My family and I comforted ourselves that he was now with my Nana and his brothers, who had died so many years earlier.
Death can really make you think. I was nine when my Nana died, and it was easy for me to believe that she went to Heaven. She was with God, she was healthy and she was watching over us. As an adult, it isn’t so easy to believe that dead relatives go to Heaven. It is still a concept I think of, and I still say that they’re both in Heaven happy now, but the world changes you.
When you grow up, ideas so simply believed as a child are no longer simple. All that has been learned while growing up has clouded faith. It’s too good to be true that a loved one can pass on to another world where there’s no pain, no stress, no worry. It’s too good to be true. But so many people believe it.
I believe it because it is my faith. Though I question my faith often, I need to believe. I don’t know who I’d be or how I’d function without it. But this makes me question why we believe these things. Faith is a good part of it, but I think it’s because we don’t want our loved ones to be forgotten.
We can’t let ourselves think that they are gone forever, their bodies rotting underneath the ground or their ashes carefully preserved in a wall. We can’t accept that they’re gone, no longer with us. We create an afterlife for them and for us so that death is no longer a mystery. There is a destination, an answer.
Is this the right way to think? Not necessarily. While people may have made up the afterlife as a way to cope, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. There is no way to prove it is there, though some people speak of ghost sightings and dreams from the dead. Those people could be telling the truth, or they could have an over-active imagination. We just don’t know.
But we don’t want our loved ones to be forgotten. So we buy thousand-dollar caskets, fancy tombstones and flowers for corpses.
Even in death, possessions mark if a person was loved or not, if they were wealthy or poor. Even in death we are judged. We try to keep our loved ones remembered, because we loved them so much. For them to be forgotten is a crime.
We try to seek an answer all our life – an answer to life and death. Both are unknown for us. We live trying to discover why life is hard and why bad things happen to good people, and we try to discover what happens after life. What is there? Is there anything? Both life and death are inevitable, and maybe if people decided to just live and die instead of seeking an answer and planning too far ahead, maybe, just maybe we won’t fear it. Maybe that’s the answer to both questions, to life and death.
I’m over-thinking. Death does that to a person. And whatever life and death is, in the end, our human desire is to be remembered. We don’t want to turn to dust with faded headstones, forgotten forever.
So I remember my grandpa, and others will too, most likely as a group for his duty to Canada so many years before, and some like me will remember him as an individual. And maybe you will too, as words on paper, a stranger you’ll never meet but a stranger you know. That is, if you’ve read to the end.
