Home Equals Hope: Edith Macefield’s Legacy

Sunday, I read an article on the front page of the NYTimes, “House That Wouldn’t Budge (or Float Away) Faces a Last Stand.” What struck me most in the article was this universal desire to live and die in our own homes. The image of Edith’s house dwarfed by slick high rises in Seattle reinforces the old adage: where there’s a will there’s a way. Edith died in her own home pictured to the right.

The comfort of familiarity is especially important to the aged. As their world narrows due to failing vision, poor hearing, tricky ambulation or mental disability, the familiar grows in importance–the old chair their father used to sit in, the couch on which Edith’s mother died. The memories sit in the very wood of a family headboard or the leg of a dining table. It’s almost as if those memories are staking claim to a place, a real space in someone’s mind.

Grandmother Katie and Aunt May “going out.”

As I write, my grandmother’s wedding ring on my finger gives me depth. I remember her and am strengthened by that memory, by the love that bound her to my grandfather that is symbolized in her wedding band. I remember seeing it on her finger as I sat on her lap while she read to me, there in her home in her bedroom where she died May 25, 1959. Her ring carries weight, not in karats but in family history. Although I cannot touch my grandmother again, something remains living in this golden circle inscribed in 1904 with their initials and wedding date.

Home is the recurrent cry I hear from the aged.  “Home, as you may or may not know, is the only place where you may go out and in. There are places you can go into, and places you can go out of; but the one place if you do but find it, where you may go out and in both, is home.” Lilith, George MacDonald