Building Her Dream House

It’s been seven years since that dark November day when I had one final question for my mom. So I snuggled up to her for the last time like I did as a child. It was our tradition. She would scratch my head, and I would purr like a kitten.

This time, though, her cancer-ravaged body was too weak to lift a finger. She had been battling the disease, her third bout, for almost a year. She hadn’t looked or acted sick for much of the year, but now the illness was taking over. Her skin and eyes were turning yellow from the bile backed up in her tumor-filled liver. Her hair was as gray as the sunless sky and her voice was slow and tired. She had lost so much weight that her body barely made a ripple under her bedcovers.

I asked her if there was anything she wished she could have done during her life on Earth. I wasn’t interested in regrets, just dreams. I was thinking maybe a trip to Paris or writing a book.

To my great shock, she said that she wished she could have built a house. I was surprised because I didn’t know that this intelligent, hard-working, bundle of ceaseless energy had such a dream. Then in all seriousness she humbly noted that she might need a little help with some minor details such as the plumbing and electrical wiring. Apparently, despite her lack of construction experience, she had already figured out the foundation, walls, ceiling, and roof.

But part of me wasn’t surprised because the smartest woman I knew could do anything she put her mind to, including growing vegetables in the Sahara, writing code for Bill Gates’ latest vision, and teaching Martha Stewart a thing or two about cooking, cleaning, and decorating.

I immediately pictured my mom, axe in hand, clearing land in the hills surrounding her Monterey home, mixing tombstone-grey concrete with a shovel and a wheelbarrow, pounding nails into 2-x-4 after 2-x-4, and climbing a ladder to shingle a roof. I could hear her taking control of the construction, barking orders like a job-site foreman and directing the traffic of incoming dump trucks and bulldozers. I could see her stopping her work to provide sandwiches and sodas to those she hired to do the plumbing and electricity. I imagined her, when the work was done, sitting on a porch swing with my dad at sunset, watching whales in the ocean. Waiting for Thomas Kincade to stop by with his easel and brushes.

It was our last meaningful conversation. A few days later, November 8, 2003, she left her California home to be with her Lord. I was down in Los Angeles when she died. Over miles of unimaginable grief I made my way to Northern California. My own trail of tears. I fearfully stumbled into her bedroom where I had left her a few days earlier.

Her body was still in the bed and she was lying with the most peaceful expression on her face. I touched her and I kissed her. I talked to her and I said goodbye, and as I did God touched me. In almost slow motion, with tears streaming down my face, I sunk to my knees by her bedside and felt the most soothing peace come over me. It was as if God had opened me up and filled me with his presence. It was slow and warm, dripping through me like maple syrup being poured on a stack of pancakes. I could feel it coarse through my body until it reached the tips of my fingers and the bottoms of my feet. It was as Philippians says, “a peace that transcends all understanding.” And I’ll never forget it.

Later, on a sunny morning we poured her ashes into the Pacific in a cove near Carmel Beach. I read Psalm 23:6, “Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” I thought of the dream house that my mother didn’t build, and was comforted by knowing that she was now living in the Lord’s house, and how much superior that must be to anything she could have erected here on Earth.

I then read John 14:2, “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you,” I found assurance in knowing that Jesus had a home for her in heaven.

Mark Twain said, “That when somebody you love dies, it is like when your house burns down; it isn’t for years that you realize the full extent of your loss.” Sometimes I feel like I’m still sifting through the rubble. Sometimes I get blindsided by a memory, or I uncover a hidden trinket of hers in my dad’s cupboard that transports me decades in the past.

I was so touched by the numerous sympathy cards and emails that I received. A friend wrote, “I suppose the truth of these things is that the grief we feel is really for ourselves, as your mom certainly wouldn't trade her current address for the one she just left.” I wondered what her new address looked like. Perhaps it resembles the home she dreamed of building herself.

My friend’s words were prophetic. In July of 2004, my first birthday without her arrived. I sat on the sand in Redondo Beach wishing for her to call and say, Happy Birthday. Oddly enough, that night she did, in the only dream I’ve had about her since she died. In the dream, my family was all together. My mom was still alive, but she was also still sick and because of her illness, she had to live somewhere else, some kind of hospital or care facility. Often we would go to visit her and we had pre-arranged that when she was all better, she would come back to live with us. One day we went to visit her and to our amazement she was no longer sick. We were beyond ecstatic. She was healthy, she could return home! But, then she calmly told us that she didn’t want to come home. I was crushed.

Devastated, I awoke in a fit of tears. It was November all over again. I shared my dream with my sister over breakfast the next morning. She was quickly able to discern the truth of my dream. It was a dream worthy of rejoicing. Like in the dream, my mom is healed. She is cancer-free. She is home. A home she didn’t build, but one of which she dreamed.
Living in the home her Father prepared for her.
Dwelling with Him forever.