Little House. Lots of Joy: When You Miss Someone, Sometimes You Sing

Yesterday, I spent too much time in my head.

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from having too much time alone with your own thoughts. By today, I honestly didn’t want to leave the house.

So I stayed home and kept my hands busy.

I dusted the places that usually get dusted once a year, if that. The tops of shelves, little nooks and crannies nobody else can see but I know are there. I worked my way through the corners of my house, wiping away the dust that gathers quietly.

Then I fixed a problem area in my decorating by adding a shelf.

It felt oddly satisfying.

None of it was particularly important. Maybe that was the point. I was just keeping my hands occupied while I fought off another strange headache and tried not to spend the whole day inside my own head.

I didn’t have groceries, so I ordered dinner through DoorDash.

Later, I started working on photographs.

And somewhere in the middle of sorting through them, I found myself singing Warren Zevon’s “Keep Me in Your Heart for a While.”

I sing that song when I’m alone.

I sing it when I’m missing my children.

Estrangement sucks.

There really isn’t a prettier word for it.

There are some kinds of missing that don’t have a place to go. You can’t call. You can’t knock on a door. You can’t simply decide that enough time has passed and everything should be different now.

So you sing.

“If I leave you, it doesn’t mean I love you any less.
Keep me in your heart for a while.”

A love song isn’t always meant for a lover. The person you’re singing it to can be someone you love who isn’t part of your life anymore.

Sometimes it’s a child.

And sometimes it’s someone who is still alive.

That kind of missing is different.

Death gives grief a terrible kind of certainty. There is a finality to it, however painful. Estrangement doesn’t always give you that. The person you miss is still somewhere in the world, living a life you may know nothing about. They can wake up in the morning. They can laugh. They can grow older. They can walk through a grocery store or sit in a restaurant or look out a window at the same moon you’re looking at.

And you can love them from a distance you never wanted.

There’s something particularly cruel about missing someone who is still here.

“Sometimes when you’re doing simple things around the house,
maybe you’ll think of me and smile.”

Photographs are strange things.

Some days, digging through them feels cathartic. Other days, it feels like picking at a wound you thought had finally scabbed over. You find a face, a room, a place, a moment you didn’t know would become a memory, and suddenly you’re there again.

The song ended, but I kept sitting there with the photographs in front of me.

The house was quiet.

Nothing had changed.

They were still somewhere out there.

And I was still here, missing them.

You just live through the day. You dust the shelves. You fix the corner. You order dinner. You look at old photographs.

And when the house gets quiet, you sing.

Because the love is still there.

Even when there’s nowhere to put it.