Jackie McGregor: ​Lost adult orphan travels back in time to find the way home

Grief complicates and changes us.

Last week, I found myself standing on a dark night outside the home I grew up in, staring at the windows. What was I looking for?

I was repeating the actions of the person who had lived in the house decades before me. He also had been lured back to that house at Christmastime. I answered the door one night to find a former resident there. He’d come back from New Zealand to Belfast for his mother’s funeral and had been inexplicably drawn to his childhood home.

We stood and cried together in the doorway when he told me his story. I had just lost my father, we were two adult orphans, swapping stories of the happy childhoods we had played out on the same stage.

When we said our goodbye, he told me he’d been glad he’d visited, that he’d felt like a door inside him had finally closed.

Research has revealed we are most likely to revisit the childhood home we were raised in between the ages of five and 12 - our formative years.

The urge usually comes when we are experiencing a problem and feel the need to reflect on our past, to try perhaps to figure out why we have made the life choices we have.

Now it was me standing on the outside. The house was a museum of memories.

A mental movie played in my head of scenes from my past. I seemed to be in search of something, some sort of closure, there appeared to be a door inside me also that was slightly ajar.

The approach of Christmas had conjured up warm memories of such happy times, I seemed to need to be near the place where they had happened. Perhaps I thought I’d find my parents there, like those old Xmas movies where an angel takes you back to your past.

As an adult orphan, I’ve often longed to go home, because for me, that house had been the only place that felt like home, but now, stood outside in the dark, nothing felt the same. It was just a house.

So much has passed since those precious childhood Christmases. Things had happened that could never have been imagined.

As I stood looking up at my former home, the owner appeared and closed the curtains in my old bedroom, a poignant gesture that spoke volumes to me.

It was time for me to bring the curtain down on that act of my life. It was no longer the home I remembered; it belonged to someone else now, my parents weren’t there, they were in my heart along with the best gift they’d ever given me – the memories we’d created. The house was merely the discarded wrapping of that gift.

Sometimes we need to go back to move forwards.

As the owner continued to close curtains, I turned to go.

I wanted to go home.