The Journal The Porch Family & Faith
The People Inside the House
Two famous people died this week. Then my husband ended up in the hospital, and for a few hours the dishes and the mess and the argument from last week all stopped mattering. What I think family actually is.
Dolly Parton died this week.
Tim Curry died, too.
Two people who, in completely different ways, have been woven into the background of our lives. Voices and faces we’ve known for decades. People we never met, yet somehow feel like we knew.
And then last night it came closer to home
My husband ended up in the hospital.
He’s okay. That’s important for me to say right at the beginning. He’s doing well, and we’re home on the other side of what was a very scary night.
But there is something about looking at the person you love and realizing that you could have lost them that changes the way you look at everything else.
For a few hours, all the ordinary things disappeared.
The dishes didn’t matter.
The mess didn’t matter.
The things that needed fixing didn’t matter.
The argument from last week didn’t matter.
The list of things I hadn’t gotten done didn’t matter.
There was just this person.
This person who lives in my house.
This person whose guitars take up a full wall of my otherwise curated bedroom, and whose work shirts always manage to get holes in them.
This person who can irritate me like nobody else on earth and make me laugh five minutes later.
This person I’ve built a life with.
What exactly is a family?
And suddenly I found myself thinking about the word family.
We tend to answer that question with biology.
A family is your mother and father. Your brothers and sisters. Your children. Your husband or wife. Your grandparents. Your aunts and uncles.
And certainly, those relationships matter.
But I don’t think that’s the whole answer.
Because there are people who share our blood who never really become our family.
And there are people who don’t share a drop of our blood who somehow become part of the very fabric of our lives.
Maybe family is the people who show up
The people who sit beside the hospital bed.
The people who know what scares you.
The people who have seen you at your absolute worst and still come back the next morning.
The people whose problems become your problems.
The people you would wake up at 3:30 in the morning to make breakfast for without even thinking about it.
Maybe family isn’t simply who we’re related to. Maybe it’s who we have decided is worth belonging to.
The people we never met
And maybe that’s why losing people we never met can hurt, too.
Dolly Parton belonged to millions of people in a strange sort of way. She was part of childhoods and road trips and kitchens and old records and family traditions. She wrote songs that people carried through weddings, funerals, heartbreaks and ordinary Tuesday afternoons.
Tim Curry did something similar, though in a completely different way. He became part of people’s memories. A voice. A character. A movie watched with someone we loved. A midnight rendezvous with people who would soon become friends. A strange little piece of our own history.
They weren’t our family, but they became part of our lives.
Knowing it and feeling it are two different things
And when someone like that dies, we realize just how much of our lives is made up of people and moments we thought would always be there.
That’s the strange thing about mortality. We know, intellectually, that everybody dies. But knowing it and feeling it are two very different things.
Sometimes it takes a famous person dying.
Sometimes it takes a phone call.
Sometimes it takes a hospital room in the middle of the night.
And sometimes it takes looking across the room at the person you’ve shared years with and realizing just how little control you actually have over how long you’ll get to keep doing this.
Last night scared me. Today I’m grateful.
Not because everything is perfect.
It isn’t. Our house is still a mess. There are still things that need fixing. There are still disagreements and unfinished projects and bills and laundry and all the other wonderfully mundane problems of being alive.
But we’re here.
He’s here.
And tonight, that feels like enough.
Pay attention to the people inside the house
Maybe that’s what death teaches us. Not that we should be afraid of it, but that we should pay attention to life while we have it.
Pay attention to the people inside the house.
Because in the end, the house isn’t the family. The stuff isn’t the family. The plans aren’t the family.
The people are.
And maybe the greatest privilege we have is getting to love them while they’re still here.
If you are reading this with a list of things you didn’t get done today, let it sit. Go find the people in your house first. It is the same reason I tell anyone starting out to start with rest, not chickens.
I write every week about this life at Hollow Road: the from-scratch cooking, the preserving, the days that don’t go to plan. It goes out every Tuesday, and you can sign up here.