This past weekend, I visited my family in Pittsburgh. My older brother, now the paternal figure in our family since Mom and Dad passed, said, “My mother was more uncomfortable being alive than anyone I’ve ever met.” His words hit me so hard that my eyes swelled with tears.

I thought about the time Mom wrote in her journal, “The demons are back.” She suffered, and my brother was right – she was uncomfortable being alive. Yet at the end of her life, she had the courage to share the traumas she’d endured. She wanted me to understand her and to understand how she reared me. “You don’t know your mother, the real me,” she said. “You need to know me before I die.”

My family home – home, that universal word that stands for stability and comfort – was often chaotic and uncomfortable. That’s why I ran to Nonna’s house to find comfort and stability. So where was my home?

Ray Haas, a dear friend, once told me, “Home is wherever Katherine is.” My son recently said, “Home is wherever my daughters are.” For them, home is not a place; it’s the people who make them feel safe and known. I understand that feeling. Home was where Nonna was. And when Nonna passed, I searched for her home in Italy because Rotondella carried her presence; touching it was like touching her and feeling her safety.

Even in my unstable family home, though, I knew I was home. There were good times too – a smile, a ritual like spaghetti and meatballs on Sunday, the smell of tomato sauce cooking, or a moment of comfort from Mom and Dad when I didn’t get the lead in the high school play. Those memories are tiny anchors, seeds of home that linger in memory.

Home, then, isn’t always a place. Sometimes it’s a person, sometimes a memory, sometimes ourselves. It moves, it shifts, but it exists whenever we feel it.

And when it does, we know it immediately.