“Just Stuff”

Losing Everything and the Meaning of Home

“It’s just stuff.” That’s what well-meaning people often tell us after we’ve lost everything. It’s even often what we tell ourselves: survival is what matters, and the rest is “just stuff.” Whether you lose your home and everything you owned through a natural disaster like a fire or flood or through an experience like divorce or theft, what you lose is tangible in nature and not life itself. There’s no denying that such losses are hard, but they are not death. That’s what we reassure ourselves anyway, and, in our initial state of shock, it can be easy to believe.

But is it true? Is it “just stuff”? Ultimately, yes, of course: life is life and death is death and we are always grateful for our survival. However, in my experience as someone who has lived through multiple adverse life events in which I lost everything, how the answer to this question actually plays out is a bit more complicated because, while what we lose is “just stuff,” it’s also not just stuff.

When you lose everything you own, your life becomes demarked into before and after. The stuff—the things you lost—were part of your before life. As such, they came to constitute familiarity and comfort. You unconsciously depended on their presence. You might have touched them, used them, and seen them daily. They were imbued with memories. They were linked to your life and relationships up until that point, including your family history, your children’s history, and sometimes your ancestors. In short, these things were part of what created a sense of home.

When you begin your after life, some things can be replaced with identical items if you have the means, but, even when they are, they are altered by an absence of familiarity. Some things you lost cannot be replaced at all, and, having already been imbued with memories, they then become memories themselves. You will have memories of items that held memories. Even if you were able to rebuild a home to the previous specifications and fill it with seemingly exact copies of all the things you lost, it still would not be the same.

There is grief involved in losing these items, and, while the grief from losing possessions does not equate with the grief of losing a life, it is real, necessary, and understandable nonetheless—and the grief takes time, lots of time.

Sometimes, the grief you experience is for the things themselves—such as pieces of art, photographs, or family heirlooms—and other times it is for the life you had before. You will walk through your new living space and notice a wall where a picture that no longer exists should hang. You will remember with longing a photograph that was itself the representation of a memory. You will experience regret about what you will not be able to pass on that was passed on to you. You will remember with nostalgia the times in the environment of the stuff of your before life even as you build your after life with its accompanying accumulations. If you are lucky enough to have retained photographs of your before life, you will view them in your after life with the pang of recollection of the demarcation you survived. You will find that memories after losing everything have layers. The before and after will always be present.

When you experience before and after events in life, it changes you. When those events involve your where you live, your home also changes. Following the first time I lost my home and everything in it, I had a vivid and intense dream about a tiny sea turtle. It felt like one of those dreams that was more than just a dream, so I paid attention to it. I thought to myself that sea turtles carry their shells—their homes—with them, so I began to collect sea turtles in the form of figurines, pictures, and stuffed animals. My sea turtles gave me great comfort for a while. However, as I found out, I had taken away the wrong message from the dream. I know this because the next time I lost my home and everything I owned, I lost my collection of sea turtles.

Eventually, I learned that sea turtles’ shells are not something external they carry with them but are part of their very skeleton. They literally build their home from within themselves. The meaning of my dream had not been to embrace sea turtles as a symbol but rather to live like a sea turtle lives. The message of the dream was I needed to build home from within myself.

When you lose the place you lived and everything you own with it, your home will change. The externalities will change, yes, but, once enough time passes and if you are open to learning the deeper lessons, your concept of home will also change. You will come to understand that your “stuff” matters and its loss necessarily and understandably involves layers of memory and grief. However, you will also come to realize that the sense of home you experience from having your possessions around you comes from your relationship to them, not from the items themselves.

In the face of great loss, what was true in the before will be true in the after: home comes from within.