This past July I attended a conference in Nashville and then took the short flight to St. Louis, where my brother-in-law picked me up at Lambert field and drove me to the cornfields of southern Illinois, to the place my mom and dad lived for the past 25 years. It’s not the house I grew up in, but it’s the most recent place I associate with my father, who died last June – in a bedroom of that house – of frontotemporal dementia.

Mom continued living there – I guess we all thought she’d be there for the rest of her life, until a string of health crises made it clear that was no longer a good option for mom or for my sister and sister-in-law, who were the ones doing all the feet-on-the-ground caretaking. Even I was helping from way over in Portugal, designated to call mom every night at 2a so she could wake and take her medications, being sure not to confuse the pills and accidentally launch really deleterious side effects from drug interactions.

It was a strange interval in our lives, having that nightly call with mom. This went on for a month; she almost always answered on the first couple of rings, and never once sounded sleepy. Mom has always had this really pleasant, professional-sounding telephone voice. I admired its innate calm so much that I would deliberately imitate it. Hello? she says, the H pronounced, the o tipping up in polite question.

One Saturday when my sis texted me that mom had a really terrible cold and needed to see a doctor, I gave mom a call to check in on her. The voice on the phone was unrecognizable as mom. After years of a cheerful Doris Day sameness to her voice, she now spoke in a breathless croak, and took several gasping attempts to finish a six word sentence. I was deeply shaken; it didn’t seem anyone who sounded like that could survive for very long. She was in the ER within 48 hours of that call, and it was a close call, with mom too weak to stand or even sit up by the time she arrived in the hospital parking lot. She was admitted with pneumonia; upon her release eight days later she hurt her back so bad she wept in pain, the only time in her entire life I’ve ever known my mom to cry. Then while treating the back pain with a heating pad mom fell asleep, giving herself second degree burns all across her lower back, necessitating more pain meds and the weeping bandages needing to be changed twice a day. My sister showed me how; she warned me beforehand, even texting me pictures, but I was still not prepared for the horrific state of the skin on mom’s back, the depth of their burns, red craters filled with pus. While I stayed with mom I took over the dressing of the burns, and they receded every day, except one that the home health care nurse was worried about.

Sorry mom, I’d say as she dropped her drawers and leaned on the dresser during my ministrations. Surprisingly, mom had no modesty about it. She even made jokes. I say surprisingly because nudity was never a thing in my household, I’ve never seen any of my family members nude or even in a state of partial undress. Whereas my stepdaughter Sophia’s favorite thing to do when she was little was smack my bare ass while I was dressing, shrieking Spanky bottom nakey butt!

All this was hard on my mom but even harder on my sister, who made the 90 minute roundtrip to mom’s house in the cornfields multiple times a week, spending endless hours waiting for hospital admission, navigating doctors appointments, prescriptions, medication schedules and interactions and the nightmare that is insurance and Medicare billing. To manage all this she quit her steady, well-paying job with good benefits to take a consultant position that enabled her to work remotely – a high-paying contract for three years. It’s perfect! she said. I can help mom when she needs it, and set my own hours. And it was perfect – for three months. Then there were budget cuts and poof, just like that my sister’s job was no more. The phone call breaking the contract lasted all of forty seconds. It gave her more free time to help with mom’s increasing needs, and everyone was and is grateful to her but if you know even a little bit about caring for sick and aging parents then you know, her life was pretty much shit.

So in the space of a few months we went from assuming mom would live out her days in her beloved house, where her beloved died, to packing her up to move to an apartment in a graduated assisted living facility near my sister, then selling the house to mom’s neighbor’s daughter, who is mountainously pregnant and with a small son that dad was very fond of. Mom was sad to leave the house but realistic that at 86 she is in the way of needing a help, and happy that if she had to sell her home it was to people she knows and likes.

And now the house is sold. It’s not her place anymore; I can’t just cruise into the garage and enter the house through the laundry room, go into the kitchen and drop my keys and purse on the center island yelling Hey mom, I’m here before opening pantry to see what she had in the way of snacks. I’ll never look out the window in the family room to see the woods embalmed in snow, spattered with blood red cardinals who liked to roost there, or see a martin in the house dad built for them.

I didn’t grow up in that house. But it was nevertheless a place I thought of as home, full of mom’s familiar things. I mailed cards and shipped gifts to that address, and stayed in the guest room when I visited. I knew where to find an extra towel or a spatula; I knew where mom kept the coffee pods for the Keurig machine. I knew to run downstairs and check the freezer for anything mom might have that I could make for our dinner later. I knew where she kept a file with all the letters each of her kids ever sent. I knew where she stored the Christmas tree and decorations. I knew the house, and my parents, so well that when after dad died mom became fixated on finding the little water fountain dad put on the back patio each summer, I found it in minutes. I was looking for that all week, mom said. But it was right where I’d expect dad to put it, the box labeled even in his big looping scrawl: fountain.

On the day of dad’s memorial service Mom had a luncheon at the house, for all those who went to the cemetery with us. It was a large crowd, Mom’s little house was filled like at Christmas, everyone holding a paper plate with pork sliders, potato salad, and that St. Louis area specialty at every gathering, fried ravioli with parmesan tomato dipping sauce. Mom was was happy so many chose to sit on the back porch and listen to the little fountain, water trickling down layers of stones to a small pond that little birds would often bathe in, dad watching quietly from a nearby chair.

Some of mom’s furniture went with her to her assisted living apartment; other pieces went to various family members. Some was sold with the house, to the new occupants, including the lovely Shaker dining table and chairs. So the dining room of my memory still looks much the same, it’s just not ours anymore, it all – the house, the dining room furniture, the flower gardens – are the background of other lives, now.

I don’t feel any attachment to that house, my sister said after mom’s house sold. I knew what she meant. It doesn’t resonate in the memory, the way the house we grew up in does, that gray shingle house with the front yard sloping down to a creek, the backyard with its porch swing and basketball hoop bordering an empty lot with a baseball backstop built by my dad. I must have tied a thousand clover necklaces in that lot, with was empty but not vacant, full of wildflowers and humming thickly with bees.

Dad had a hard time leaving that house, in part because he’d put so much of himself into it, but also in part because he’d dug a koi pond in the backyard, landscaping a tranquil little garden around it. He spent a lot of time back there with those fish. and developed such an attachment to them that he went back and visited them after he moved away. They miss me, he told me. We tried to get him to build a new koi pond at the new place but dad didn’t want new fish, he wanted the fish he’d been caring for, the fish that recognized him. I get it. He built a new garden around the garden ornaments he’d accumulated, including a red pump handle. And it was, in many ways, more beautiful than the garden he left behind, but I know it didn’t make him feel any better about his fish.

There are things I remember about each house I’ve lived in – something that tipped the scales for choosing this house over another. The first house I bought with my first husband had a closed porch, the doors communicating to the dining room each a white lattice with twelve panes of glass. The small kitchen with its black and white tile. In our next house, a replica of those doors leading to a backyard, with a pool and a magnificent garden was a main attraction, along with huge double front doors, a curving staircase. The next house introduced me to the beauty and functionality of sun rooms. Another house had a cunning design, the sleeping quarters on one side of the house, the kitchen and living and entertaining areas separated by a long hall and beautiful carved doors.

Now here I sit in Portugal, in a house with a double glass-paned doors just a few feet away, a sunroom, a pool, a curving staircase and intricately carved double front doors, designed so that the sleeping quarters are well away from the noise of the living areas, the whole thing surrounded by gardens that contain a fountain and a koi pond. It’s as if I am living everywhere I’ve ever loved, all at once. If it’s true that everywhere you go there you are, it’s also true (for me anyway) that everywhere I’ve been, here I am.