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78–The only home I’d known.

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78–The only home I’d known.

Somehow, when my father died, I also lost our past.

Joey Rubin
Jun 4, 2023
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78–The only home I’d known.

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Less than 6 months after my father’s diagnosis, my parents packed up the house, sold it, and left California. 

I’d moved away (and returned) and moved away (again) years before, as had my sister and brother. It made sense for them to live there; they had for over 30 years. But it made less sense for him to die there.

And so, on top of grieving my father, I also spent the year and a half of his illness grieving the only place I’d ever known as “home.”

I’m not the first person to say it: when we grieve we don’t just hurt for the loss of a loved one, but also for the future we’ve lost with them.

Somehow, when my father died, I also lost our past. 

This poem, full of the music my father loved, and of his wanting to share that music with my nephew, captures the moment I first felt the weight of that other loss. I felt it, not as an abstract force like nostalgia, but as a rupture as real and final as death.



California 

You made a soundtrack for Bunky

with your favorite songs

& for months he toddles up 

to your phone

presses you to cue 

Miriam Makeba, Norah Jones

Georges Moustaki, dances wild

like we once did 

small bodies in audience 

to your wide smile

/

Now, 

I hold your phone to your

working ear 

play it lightly and you 

list from side to side, 

a small dance 

though no less wild

/

(the social worker, visiting, 

says: “It speaks to his soul, not

his head”)

/

Then, 

Joni Mitchell sings: “California,

California, I’m coming home.”

& 

Woody Guthrie sings:

“I’m going to California

where we’ll sleep out 

every night.”

And I crack. 

/

We will never go 

back 

to California, will we Pops.

/

It is not 

going to be possible

unless I carry you there 

in a box.


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My sister and I at home in California – reading in the living room . May 23, 2013.

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