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a family. I had my beautiful son, who was then five months old. That first night in Santa Fe, after Ronan was asleep, I lay in bed and watched monsoon rain waterfall over my window and listened to thunder pummeling the seemingly endless New Mexico sky. I remembered that silly dollhouse dream as I had so often over the years and thought:
This is even better.
    When Ronan was newly born, a friend of ours asked, “Isn’t it interesting that, of all of us, Ronan has the most life ahead of him and yet he’s the least worried about it?” The first part turned out not to be true, of course. Ronan’s life would be short—but he would never worry about its length or quality. He would never feel shame, fear or regret. He would never hate himself or his parents. He would find nobody to blame. He would never sit and stare at a house inside a glass box and wish for his life to be different; he would just live it. He would always be at home in his body, the only one he knew, a body he didn’t question. He was always, without any effort, at home in the world.
    Our home, our life with Ronan, was not the definition of heartbreak. It was, to put it bluntly, the truth about life: that it exists side by side with death. Other cultures and traditions are acutely aware of this intimate pairing. In 1996, as a Fulbright scholar in Seoul, I celebrated the autumn festival of Chusok with my host family at a raucous, boozy party at the family grave plot, complete with music and the favorite foods and drinks of the departed. In one Día de los Muertos image from Mexico, images that are plentiful in Santa Fe, a robust, rosy-cheeked man walks with his skeleton rattling in his arms. One fall afternoon before his terminal diagnosis, I walked with Ronan on the arroyo path near our house, his smiling face peeking up at me from the front pack, the last of the day’s sun warm on my shoulders, the mountains darkening to purple in the distance, and I thought,
This is a peaceful place to die.
Since that day, I slowly learned a lesson that I had been avoiding for years, an avoidance that had fueled my frantic search for a home while simultaneously making it impossible to find. I finally began to pick up pieces of wisdom that I had been walking past for most of my life.
    In Frances Sherwood’s novel
Vindication,
a fictionalized account of the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, the tormented and occasionally suicidal protagonist is desperate to discover the right way to live. She tells her longtime friend and publisher that she is overwhelmed by “all that might be, not be, so be it, your mind going a hundred thoughts between this moment and the next.” Her friend replies: “But my dear, you have arrived. You are here, at your life. Put yourself down, settle in. It is yours. You have been living it all along.”
    Years ago I was walking down a sun-washed street in Antigua, Guatemala. Kids rocketed by on little pipe-cleaner bikes. Nobody drinking coffee at the outdoor cafés reacted when the active volcano in the distance let out a soft puff at irregular intervals, as if it were taking slow, shallow breaths.
    Passing an open doorway I saw a man teaching a woman to dance in a small, plain room. He watched her face as she counted softly to herself in English and dust spun in the sunlight on the floor around their moving feet. As I approached the end of the street, I watched a woman wearing a ragged backpack and long braids cross the cobblestones and knock on the door. She looked weary but eager. After waiting for a moment she knocked on the door again. I stopped and waited, too. Suddenly the door opened and a woman with long dark hair flung herself into the backpacker’s arms. They pulled apart and looked at each other, hugged again. The two friends or lovers or sisters rocked from side to side, mouths trembling, one woman’s arms barely able to reach around the other’s huge pack, reunited. I felt homesick suddenly, for my friends, for connection. I could see so