challenges. Strangeness was frightening, but mostly it was exciting. I didn’t have a home to call my own, but that didn’t matter to me. I was poor most of the time. The more uncomfortable my habitat the better, because that meant I was saving money.
Back then, I thought I would live forever, that I was invincible, and I embraced my freedom with an abandon that belongs only to the young. I wasn’t so different from anyone else in her late teens and twenties. But age and kids and actually earning a decent living changed me, and cancer even more so. I have become a creature who yearns for comfort, for a sense of security, for home. It’s obvious in the way I cried hysterically amid the impersonal unfamiliarity of MSK and how gratefully I returned to NYU. It’s obvious in the way I just want to actually be at home all the time now.
After eight months of construction, a couple more months of punch list items and hanging things on the wall, and buying a piano (our last piece of new furniture), the home that Josh and I dared to dream of in the summer of 2015, despite the ever-present black cancer cloud, has been realized. I cannot determine what I love most about our new home: the oak-patterned, gilded wallpaper that accents one of my bedroom walls; the mantel over the new electric fireplace made from a piece of reclaimed walnut; the row of custom-built closets with lights that automatically go on and off with the opening and closing of the doors; radiant heating in the bathroom floors; or the motorized window treatments. I made all the design decisions—thank you, Josh, for giving me so much latitude—knowing that this place would be the last place I will inhabit and most certainly would be where my family and friends will come see me in my final days and where I will die. I wanted it to be a place of as much luxury and comfort as Josh and I could afford.
Much more important than that, I designed it, knowing that it will be the place in which my children will grow up. I had to think about the adjustable nature of shelving in their closets, the versatility of a bathtub over a shower stall over time, and how the extra room could serve as a playroom now and then one day as a teenage hangout separate and away from the adults. I think of the apartment as a gift to my children, a tangible legacy of a home that I hope they will treasure for many years.
Now, there are many nights when I lie on Mia’s or Belle’s bed staring up at the princess chandelier that hangs above and I recall all the nights that I lay on my own bed as a little girl and then as an adolescent. Of course, back then my mattress was lumpy and dented, and I stared at a popcorn ceiling and an ugly square overhead light fixture with a giant black screw in the middle. But it was in that childhood bedroom—a room that has long since been demolished together with the rest of the house—that I wondered about my future, about the faceless and nameless man I would one day marry, about what seemed like four long years at a faraway college that loomed ahead. It was there that I dreamed of seeing the world, of traveling, of adventure and romance. I stressed about exams and worried about friendship dramas that I no longer remember. Now I lie on my daughters’ beds and wonder what thoughts, fears, and dreams will course through their minds and hearts as they lie in that exact same position. I think to myself, as I stare at these rooms I built just for them, that if I concentrate hard enough, I will leave a bit of me behind in this place, so that when they lie in their beds with exhaustion or anxiety or hope, I will be there to share in those most intimate thoughts and feelings, that a part of my spirit will always be with them, especially in this place. To the extent that a place can convey anything of substance about those who labored to make it, I hope their bedrooms, their bathroom, this entire apartment, their home, will bestow upon them the absolute certainty that their mother loved them so very much.
Home is where I am now. And, in a