I Was Unprepared for the Grief of Selling a Family Home

At a loss for how to understand, or even articulate, the sadness I was feeling, I turned to the internet and was disappointed to find a dearth of resources that addressed grief surrounding the sale of a home. Houses are, after all, the foundation for life, the places we eat, sleep and make memories with loved ones.

I eventually found Lauren Breen, a professor of psychology at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, who has made it her life’s work to understand the psychology of grief and loss over an entire lifetime, not just the acute phases immediately after the passing of a loved one. In 2020 she wrote a piece in The Straits Times about grieving a childhood home.

“Whenever there is a death loss, there are multiple secondary losses,” Breen told me. “We think of only the primary things, the death of a person, but grief also means I’ve lost a part of my identity or a former home — all sorts of cascading things related to that loss that come at different points in time.” 

Many people think that grief is a finite process with an end, she added. “Grief is not something you can necessarily ‘move on’ from. It is a culmination of everything in our life; it could be something we lost 10 or 50 years ago.”

To help clients move through grief of any kind, Breen focuses on helping them establish “grief literacy.” “Just like talking about the environment, politics and football, death and grief should be something to talk about,” she said.

Breen sent me an article written by two Canadian colleagues, Mary Ellen Macdonald and Susan Cadell, cofounders of Grief Matters, a Canadian organization that helps communities make room for grief. In the article, they wrote, “Grief is whatever the griever says it is.” In my case, it was the tortuous and protracted process of letting go of my mom’s house, the most tangible connection to her I still had.  

Breen’s recommendations for working through this non-death loss were to take a small, physical piece of the house, like a plant from the garden, or the doorframe molding where family heights were measured. When I asked her if looking at photos was a healthy option, she said I should look at them only occasionally — say, an hour on a Sunday afternoon — so that I could stay in control of the grief rather than it taking control of me. 

“If it’s something taking up your whole life,” Breen told me, “that would be a problem, and the point at which you need help.”

I now see that I was in the category of “needing help” last summer. I spent many sleepless nights mulling over minutiae: When do I have time to clean the gutters? What if the roof leaks when I’m not there? What if I get a renter and they trash the place? And the larger, existential questions: How can I even think of renting or selling this house when it was given to me in such love?

I became so obsessed with the house that I would check in multiple times per week, weeding, watering the plants and keeping everything just so, in the subconscious hope that Mom would magically walk back through the door someday.

Finances finally forced my hand. As funds dwindled and months dragged on without finding a suitable renter, my fiancé and I realized we couldn’t afford to maintain two houses. We had to let one go.

Mom’s house sold in a week. I had one month to move everything out and prepare it for the new owners, slowly dismantling the beautifully curated house piece by piece. The day before closing, my sister and I sat on the floor in the empty living room, exactly where Dad’s hospice bed overlooked the backyard. We lit a candle, read a few carefully selected poems, cried and thanked the house for the sanctuary it provided our parents.

The grief still flows in waves, and probably will for some time. The new owners love the house, but I can’t yet bring myself to drive by. I do find comfort, however, in the wooden sign that once hung outside the door and now hangs outside my own house. It’s a relic from our Swedish great-grandfather, inscribed with one word of welcome: Välkommen.

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.