Maybe it’s because my best friend and her sisters helped their parents gut out and sell the house they (we) grew up in.
The house where we baked cookies and found makeup (sort of) and celebrated birthdays and talked about boys and got into trouble and made a few fines and had wedding showers and breastfed our babies and cried over unfathomable losses and laughed and cried and hugged and talked about it all.
The house where his father made beautiful woodwork and his mother prepared wonderful meals and they all left indelible memories. And then one day, the things that made the house charming—narrow, windy hardwood stairs, for example—made it unsafe. 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 on 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 talked at events. We have mutual friends. He serves 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 to his message.
“Thirty-nine years ago next month, our parents bought their first and only home,” he wrote. “They quickly turned this house into our home, and this house became the heart of the neighborhood. Everyone was welcome, and man, there were a ton of people sharing good times in this place.
He posted on September 20, the day he and his sisters, Lucia and Jennifer, closed on the house and passed it on to its new rightful owners. Their parents had both died: their father in August 2022, their mother in March 2023.
“My mother died of a broken heart,” Melendrez told me.
He stopped by to see her a few weeks after her father died and she was sitting alone, crying, in the living room.
“Without my dad,” Melendrez said, “it was just a house for her.”
I called Melendrez because his post made me think that we don’t talk enough in our culture about the emotional weight of saying goodbye to a home. It’s such a common experience for families who are lucky enough to live in a place long enough to make it their own, make it their home, make room for others, and create the memories that make up a life. But I don’t know if we have the right language for this.
Melendrez’s parents bought the house on Avenue L in Southeast Chicago in 1985. He was 13 years old. His sisters were 9 and 2 months old. They moved from an apartment six blocks away. I asked him if he remembered moving day.
“Every minute,” he said. “I remember the moment we went to the viewing. I remember how happy my father 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 opening the house. I remember going in. I remember their pride.
He remembers the first phone call he received in that house. It was his eighth grade football coach calling to tell him he was on the all-star team.
“I was so excited to live in this house and look out these windows,” he said, “and I answered the phone, ‘Good evening.'”
His coach took pleasure in it. “What’s up, Alfred Hitchcock,” he replied.
It took a year after their parents’ deaths before Melendrez and her sisters decided to sell the house. There was, of course, almost 40 years of life to dig into, plus the idea of someone else owning it, someone else throwing 4th of July parties, someone else or sitting on the porch.
“A friend of mine – he didn’t have a father in his life, his mother was sick, he came to live with us,” Melendrez said. “He completed his high school education in this house. When my cousin was dealing with a domestic violence situation, she brought her and her children to our house and lived there. Some of his things were still there when we were cleaning them. There were remnants of this center of love that my parents had built everywhere.
“And then we will have to say goodbye to him,” he continued. “People don’t talk about it.”
He found a little way to do it. In his Facebook post, the one that stopped me in my tracks, he invited people to share a memory of the house on Avenue L. “It would be great to hear from them as we process this sea of emotions,” he wrote.
And people shared. And the memories were fond and lovely. And they also reminded us of all the ways we can help each other, need each other, improve each other, and bring each other joy if we want to.
“Not everyone has that place I talked about,” Melendrez told me. “For some people, the last place they want to be is within 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 to other people? Because not everyone has that. Not everyone has what we had.
Yes, I would say. Not had. Because that’s the problem with a house like that, a house like that. It’s a building, of course. And a building changes hands. But it becomes a part of you. It shapes you. It supports you. You take it with you.
And everyone who was lucky enough to share it too.
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