Heidi Stevens: Saying goodbye to a childhood house that was so much more than a house

Maybe it’s because my best friend and her sisters just helped their parents empty and sell the house they (we) grew up in.

The house where we baked cookies and figured out makeup (kind of) and celebrated birthdays and talked about boys and got in some trouble and made some amends and hosted wedding showers and nursed our babies and grieved some unfathomable losses and laughed and cried and hugged and talked through it all.

The house where her dad made beautiful woodwork and her mom made wonderful meals and they all made indelible memories. And then one day the things that made the house charming—narrow, windy, hardwood stairs, for example—made it dangerous. And it was time to move on. And they did. (Physically, anyway.)

Maybe that’s why Mike Melendrez’s Facebook post stopped me in my tracks. And why I clicked through all the photos and read all 62 comments and I don’t even really know him, not in a way that would attach me to his childhood home. We’ve chatted at events. We have mutual friends. He sits on the boards of The Big Shoulders Fund and St. Frances de Sales High School (his alma mater), and I admire the work he does for young people.

But I was drawn in by his post.

“Thirty nine years ago next month, our parents bought their first and only house,” he wrote. “They quickly turned that house into our home, and that home became the heart of the neighborhood. All were welcome, and man, there were a TON of people who shared good times in that place.”

He posted on Sept. 20, the day he and his sisters, Lucia and Jennifer, closed on the house and passed it to its rightful new owners. Their parents had both died — their dad in August 2022, their mom in March 2023.

“My mom died of a broken heart,” Melendrez told me.

He stopped to see her a few weeks after his dad died and she was sitting alone, crying, in the living room.

“Without my dad in it,” Melendrez said, “it was just a house to her.”

I called Melendrez because his post got me thinking that we don’t talk enough in our culture about the emotional weight of saying goodbye to a house. It’s such a common experience for families who have the good fortune to live in a place long enough to make it theirs and make it a home and make space for others and make the memories that make up a life. But I don’t know if we have the right language for it.

Melendrez’s parents bought the house on Avenue L on Chicago’s Southeast Side in 1985. He was 13. His sisters were 9 and 2 months old. They moved from an apartment six blocks over. I asked if he remembered moving day.

“Every minute of it,” he said. “I remember when we went on the viewing. I remember how happy my dad was. They only bought one house. I remember it cost $37,500 and one day I said it cost $37,000 and my dad was like, ‘No, Mike. It was $37,500.’ I remember him unlocking the house. I remember walking in. I remember their pride.”

He remembers the first phone call he ever received in that house. It was his eighth-grade football coach calling to say he made the all-star team.

“I was so excited to be living in this house and looking out these windows,” he said, “and I answered the phone, ‘Good evening.’”

His coach got a kick out of that. “What’s up, Alfred Hitchcock,” he replied.

It took a year after their parents died for Melendrez and his sisters to get their heads around selling the house. There was the almost 40 years worth of living to dig through, of course, plus the idea of someone else owning it, someone else throwing Fourth of July parties, someone else sitting on the front stoop.

“A friend of mine—he had no father in his life, his mom was ill, he came to live with us,” Melendrez said. “He finished high school from that home. When my cousin was dealing with a domestic violence situation, she brought her and her kids to our house and lived there. Some of her stuff was still there when we were cleaning it out. There were remnants everywhere of this center of love that my parents built.

“And then you have to say goodbye to it,” he continued. “People don’t talk about that.”

He found a small way to. In his Facebook post, the one that stopped me in my tracks, he invited people to share a memory from the house on Avenue L. “It would be great to hear them as we process this sea of emotions,” he wrote.

And people shared. And the memories were loving and lovely. And they were also a reminder of all the ways we can help each other and need each other and improve each other and bring joy to each other if we’re willing.

“Not everybody has that place that I wrote about,” Melendrez told me. “Some people, the last place they want to be is inside their own four walls. And I wonder if people think about how you make your house a home for your family. And can you open it up to other people? Because not everyone has that. Not everyone has what we had.”

Have, I would say. Not had. Because that’s the thing about a house like that—a home like that. It’s a building, sure. And buildings change hands. But it becomes part of you. It shapes you. It sustains you. You take it with you.

And so does everyone who had the good fortune to share it.