“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” ~ John Lennon

Or in our case, life is what happens when everything around you crumbles.

I don’t know what we were thinking in December. I can’t really remember that far back. Maybe we thought it was our first Christmas in our new house (exciting!) or maybe we thought it was the beginning of a tradition. I can almost guarantee we weren’t thinking about where we are today, less than three months later. We weren’t thinking it was our last Christmas with Alan (John’s dad). We weren’t thinking it would be our *only* Christmas in our new house. We weren’t thinking about dementia or Medicaid or over half million dollar homes.

I knew I was unhappy. That was certain. Every day was a heavy lift, from getting out of bed in the morning to caring at all about what happened during the day. Depression is like that – sadness is like that. Pervasive, consistent, ebbing and flowing.

Anyway, I couldn’t even tell you the timeline of how things happened. But we confessed to each other that we weren’t happy. We daydreamed about moving home. And then, somehow, we made it happen? We drove down and looked at houses. We found a builder (our old builder, nonetheless) building beautiful homes close to where we used to live. We sold our current house (in about 36 hours which was WILD!). We have movers booked. We have a plan. It feels good. Life feels a little less … awful.

Because amidst all the moving decisions and day trips in snow squalls and disappointing house tours, we were dealing with something that had no silver lining. And it feels a little too raw and too real to even write about. Because death is final. Because everything that happens leading up to death and after death is confusing and heartbreaking and desperate and never ever enough.

The entire fabric of our lives changed shape in nearly every single way. It has been a brutal start to a year.

But out of that darkness has come a true appreciation and understanding of what home is. Of what support networks look like (and their utter beauty). I don’t think I ever knew before, but I know with absolute certainty now, that home is Chester County. And our life, the one we spent seven years building, was not worth leaving. I’ve heard people use lots of different words in regards to the decisions we’ve made recently. But I can promise this – I don’t care about what anyone else thinks. Deep in my soul, in the fiber of my bones, I know this is the right decision. And even though it has been exhausting and will continue to be hard and stressful — there is no other stress I’d rather have than the stress of fighting for my home. Fighting for our life and for what brings us joy.