I wanna live in your house…

My mother passed away last month.

It’s been very difficult to know how to write about this. But I think I’m supposed to try.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to write about several strange coincidences surrounding her passing. I still don’t quite understand how they all relate to one another, or what they mean. But I can’t ignore them.

For several months now, I’ve had a song scheduled for release on my birthday, this Wednesday. I originally recorded it as a tribute to my grandmother and also to my grandfather, who shared a birthday with me and had also wanted to become a songwriter. It’s a rendition of “Your House,” a reggae song by Steel Pulse. As I understand it, the song is about wanting to live in the house of goodness, the house of love, or the house of God, whichever words suit your personal mythology, when the world pulls you away from your belief..

It’s difficult to explain, but I can’t shake the feeling that some kind of conversation is happening here between myself and the other side. The coincidences are too obvious to dismiss.

When my mother died, I was in Italy, visiting Napoli, the city where I was born and which I had only visited once before since leaving as a baby. I was there to attend a family reunion where I met my Italian family for the first time. An event that, in my own story and imagination, had come to symbolize a very significant destination on the path of a long journey toward healing my relationship with my past, and with my relationship to family.

My grandmother was the person who showed me unconditional love throughout a troubled childhood, when I wasn’t receiving that love from my mother. My grandmother’s ancestors migrated to the United States, and a hundred years later, I was born in the same place where they had lived for generations.

For years, I have wanted to reconnect with our ancestry and during the weeks following my mothers death, I found myself staying in the village where our ancestors lived.

And then there’s the song itself.

At the end of the recording, I included a voicemail from my grandmother. It’s a voice message that begins with "Hi Joshua, believe it or not, I got a message from you saying Happy Mothers Day.."

I was with my grandmother when she passed away. When she could no longer speak, I laid my head on her shoulder. I fell asleep, and for one very brief moment, I saw her smiling face in a dream, almost as if she were saying goodbye.

When I first heard “Your House,” I thought of my grandmother, a devout Catholic, going to live in the house of God. That was why I wanted to record this as a tribute to her. It already meant so much to me..

Then there are the words “I wanna live in your house”, which also brought back a memory from my childhood. I remembered wanting to leave my mother’s house and live with my grandmother instead. I remembered repeating those very words.

“I wanna live in your house.”

This struck me deeply. To see the same sentiment cross generations, cross time, express itself in very different ways and still mean such a similar thing. To want to live with love...

Looking back, I can see something in that childhood declaration that I couldn’t have understood at the time. It was more than a desire to escape. It was directions on a long road. I wanted to be like my grandmother. I wanted to become someone who could offer others the same kind of love and safety that she had given me.

And now, with my mother gone, I can’t help feeling like my grandmother is teaching me to offer that understanding, love and safety to my mother, too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what happiness might have looked like for her. About what could have been done to help her, what she suffered, and what her life might have been like if she could have been helped.

I’m still trying to understand it all..

Hearing my grandmothers voice now.. "....I'm returning your call...."

I can't help but think shes showing me how to forgive my mother. How to love. How to understand that she wanted the same thing that I do.. That we all do...

I hope my mother has found some peace. Sadly, the vast majority of the memories and stories I have to share about her are very sad.. But I do have some of her laughing.. smiling..

I hope that she made it through to the other side.. That she is there smiling like my grandmother was when she said goodbye to me in a dream..

With that in mind, I've decided to follow through with releasing my rendition of Steel Pulse's "Your House" on Wednesday with the intention to aid my mother in passing peacefully from this world to the next.

me and mom in 2012