Coming back brought me face to face with unprocessed grief. Here's what home means now.

In the upstairs room of our new house, I’m an island, surrounded by half-opened and partially explored moving boxes. 

I shouldn’t be intimidated by the lopsided stacks of boxes in the corners and the middle of my gray carpeted floors, but I am. Other homeowners in my family have told me: Take your time. Go room by room. Figure out where you want to put things.

Easier said than done. These boxes have moved more than a queen in a lengthy chess game. I know everything’s supposed to be here, but no matter where I place something, it immediately feels out of place. 

I position the welcome mat on the floor on the inside of the house, just before the front door. It’s not visitors who most need convincing that they’re welcome here.

It’s me.

City of memories

I could hardly get the words out between sobs, but my husband was patient.

It was five years ago. We sat on the bed, his hands resting on my lap and my hands cupping my face. We had just seen my Uncle Jeffrey at my mother’s house in Edgewood, Maryland, for the first time in years. 

“He looks so much like my grandma,” I said, my tears creating a small pool in my hands. 

My Uncle Jeffrey’s resemblance to Grandma is unlike any of her other children. I wasn’t ready to see her, but not to see her: her dark skin, her wide, bulged eyes and her hands, distinctly creased at the joints on her fingers.

I hadn’t talked to my husband about her much. Only once, when my sister and I abruptly exited his grandmother’s birthday celebration as they played “A Song For Mama” by Boyz II Men. We sang that to Grandma on her birthday every year. Now, the words of the song tap dance on an ache that hasn’t healed. Aside from that explanation, I tucked the rest away. I’ve gotten too good at that. 

I can’t be sure that I said I loved her the last time we spoke. It was over 15 years ago, when I still lived in Los Angeles. She called me on my 13th birthday; I was headed to California Pizza Kitchen with a couple of friends and my mom after school. Our call dropped just as I was passing my drama teacher's classroom. I thought I could call her back in the morning. 

Grandma died of a major heart attack that night – 57 years of life, gone. Three hours ahead and more than 2,000 miles away, the news flattened me. No one in my life had died before, no one this close, at least. 

I left Baltimore in the early ‘90s when I was 3 and moved to Los Angeles when my mom married my former stepdad. My sister and I still came back to Baltimore to visit our dad for summers and Christmas. Grandma even came out to California a couple times. 

They messily divorced when I was in high school. My mom tried to reassemble her life in California, but Baltimore offered her more of an opportunity to do so. She needed to go back. College, though, would keep me in California. 

I hugged her tightly in front of her SUV packed with her belongings and our two miniature schnauzers. She told me she loved me, and I waited until she drove off before I cried. 

I moved back to the East Coast in 2016 after college and getting married, ready to start making a life of our own. One in five millennials has given up on homeownership; we wanted to transcend that statistic.

We bought our first house in my hometown in September 2021, less than two weeks before my husband’s 30th birthday. 

I should have been ecstatic. But being back in Baltimore made me realize how living on a different coast had let me distance myself from losing Grandma. Everywhere I look now, I see her face.

I drive past rowhomes in different corners of Baltimore, relying on navigation to keep me oriented. Some of the buildings are boarded up; others are freshly renovated with copper-colored bricks. Thinking of Grandma while in this city erodes entire blocks. Even the ones my sister and I once sprinted down to get her a Betty Boop purse from the Inner Harbor for Christmas.

I look up pictures of her old house online. It’s been sold and gutted to make room for marble tabletops and new memories. I don’t think I would even want to go inside if I could. 

It is no longer the place where my dad would drop us off in the summer for overnight stays when he had to work odd shifts at the police station. That gray row home with three uneven steps leading to the front door doesn’t exist any more. I can still hear the shuffle of the brown and black beads hanging from her doorway that separated her dining room and living room. 

"Jazz."

I miss the way she said my name with a raspiness that only a pack or two of Newports a day could harmonize. I pretended to smoke around her once, using a thin pretzel stick to take puffs. She handed me her real cigarette and told me to go ahead. I couldn’t have been older than 9 or 10. I hacked so hard I thought I was going to upchuck my lung on her bedroom floor. She laughed and snatched the cigarette from me before reclining back in her chair like her work was done. Lesson learned. 

It might have been the same visit when she taught us how to open whole crabs — an Old Bay seasoned commodity in Baltimore. We kept asking to have some, and she said that she wouldn’t pick the crab meat for all of us. We had to learn how to do it ourselves, and she would only show us once because that’s life. I never unlearned that, and to this day I laugh under my breath whenever someone asks me how I open my crabs so fast. 

A path toward healing

I wish grief wasn’t so much like shattered glass, deciding which pieces to pick up. Which pieces are worth bleeding for. Baltimore makes it easier to talk about Grandma out loud. It’s where I remember her the most authentically, even if it hurts. 

She always made paper dolls with lavish coats for my cousins and me. They'd have bright blond hair or pixie cuts. Her drawings had no bounds. Her creativity was not a product of where she was or where she’d been. It was where her imagination could go.

One summer, I told her that I was going to get braces in the fall. The thought was a prepubescent horror that haunted me deeply. She drew a portrait of me with box braids and a pinkish purple turtleneck sweater. She etched my smile with cross-like brackets on my teeth. My beauty was second to her “Love, Grandma” signature in the bottom left hand corner, written in the most elegant cursive I’ve ever seen. 

I still haven’t had pancakes that are better than hers. I always meant to ask her how she got that perfect rim of golden brown crust.  Looking out of my office window at sunrise reminds me of the many mornings I’d wait until the first ray of light hit the rooftops near her house before heading to a corner store that was open. My sister and I liked getting the Aunt Jemima pancake mix, King syrup and thick-sliced bacon before she woke up. I still can’t stomach how runny she liked her eggs and the undercooked bacon she consumed. 

My mom told me recently that she was angry with Grandma for not taking  better care of herself so she could be here with her. It is my mom’s right to open the curtain on any stage of grief she needs to feel. After all, that was her mother, and Grandma always dreamed my mom would come back home. Now, my mom is here, and Grandma isn’t. 

Her old house is seven miles away from my new house. I don’t know why I mapped it; maybe the overzealous masochist in me needed to know that I was close, but not close enough. 

Here, but not in time. 

I flood my husband’s ears with random things I think we still need to get for the house. His response — we will, we will — is as repetitious as a scratched CD. But there are things we’ll never have: We’ll never have her over for dinner, hear her cackling laughter echo off the still-bare walls. 

And yet, I know for this place to truly be home, it has to become more than a mummified version of what I can remember about Grandma. This is the city where I’ll soon turn 30. The city where I’ll become a mother. The city where branches of my family tree are still cycling old with new. 

Moving into our house was a group effort. My dad, husband and brother lugged in the furniture and other large items. My sister, my aunt, my stepmom and I gathered in the kitchen and attempted to organize. 

Between the sounds of tape ripped from boxes and the crunch of crumbled newspaper, my sister asks me where things should go. I usher her to different rooms in this house that’s almost home, knowing that I’ll keep moving these possessions around until they finally start to feel like they’re where they belong. 

Jasmine Vaughn-Hall is a culture reporter for the USA TODAY Network's Atlantic Region How We Live team. Contact her at jvaughnhal@ydr.com or (717) 495-1789. Follow her on Facebook (@JasmineVaughnHall), Twitter (@jvaughn411), and Instagram (@jasminevaughnhall).