This Old House

The house I was born in went up for sale last year. Not the house I grew up in; the one I lived in until I was three, with my mom and my dad and my older sister. A little bungalow on Albion Street. It was just the four of us there, those few years before we moved into the house I think of as our family home—the house where my little sister was born, where we grew up, and where my parents still live to this day.

My little sister died by suicide when she was 28, eight years ago. It’s as simple and complex as that.

Is her death relevant? Does it matter to the story of our first house that she’s no longer with us? She hadn’t been born then.