I started thinking about writing this two days after a Valentine’s Day gas leak caused a house explosion on my street.

The blast occurred during a standpipe removal, razing a house to the ground and killing one of the homeowners, Jyoti Moorthy. An Enbridge worker was left seriously injured.

When I began, I thought I was going to write about houses, what they mean to us, and the affront to the idea of home that this incident represents. I had just been accosted by a police officer, who needed to see photo ID to prove that my house, within the police barricade, was indeed my house. I was upset, alone for the weekend, and on a Valentine’s chocolate bender. In my shock it seemed very clear that the whole experience needed to be written down, and equally obvious how I would go about doing that. Surely the event itself, the cause, would be the best explanation of what I was feeling. So dramatic, an explosion, and of a house no less. It begs to be read as symbol.

You can probably already see the difficulties I almost immediately came upon when I started writing. Perhaps it is the violence of such an event, our awareness of that moment as a moment, which causes ordinary facts to suddenly seem representative of something larger. I found myself in a situation like that in Don McKay’s poem, “Suddenly, at home.” It reads, “there was no place we could sit or look / that was not changed to an icon, cursed / with significance.”

The danger was the ease with which I could fall into epic simile: “as the snow melts in the spring to reveal the shards of glass that have been with us this past month though under the surface, so too in grief…”

It wasn’t that bad-but it was close. I found myself making gestures I knew I didn’t have the pomposity to make, and writing elegies where I didn’t want to find comfort in the final turn. Worse, much, much worse, I knew that if I wrote about what was really important-the senseless death of one woman-I ran the risk of appropriating someone else’s grief for my own ends. It felt cold, it felt callous. It felt wrong.

I mention McKay (this year’s Jack McClelland writer-in-residence) because it was one day while sitting in class that I heard “Homing” read aloud, and found in that poem a description of exactly what I had been facing. This is how it ends:

Home is what we know

and know we know, the intricately

feathered nest. Homing

asks the question.

“Homing” struck me because it showed what had been going wrong. I had been trying to talk about home when what I was really facing were issues of homing. This is not to say that neighbours haven’t found their idea of “home” shaken. To the families who have had to move because of structural damage to their houses, or the threat of psychological damage posed by the constant reminder of the accident, I’m sure the notion of home is not as firm as it once was.

But I can’t speak to this. For all that my house became something of an impromptu police headquarters and trauma centre after the blast, when I got home, my house was still my house. I had felt awful for the two days after the explosion, but it was only upon being stopped from entering my house that things came to a head. Homing was the question. Intuitively, I started rereading McKay. In “Before the Moon,” McKay imagines a world without poetry by imagining what the world would be like without the moon. Before the moon,

Whatever a thing was,

that was it, no ifs or

airspace. Place was obese

before the moon was moon, so full of itself

there was no leaving home, and so

no dwelling in it either. Longing was short

and sedentary.

To McKay, a bird’s ability for homing is a useful metaphor in our own lives. Home is only home because we’ve left it, and this has something to do with the length and mobility of longing.

We all know what grief looks like, in its varied forms. You’ve likely experienced it yourself. We know what grief looks like-not so with loss. Simple, quiet loss, and the weight it carries for our tangential claims to the dead. The truth is that while I did know Jyoti, I did not know her well. Though I think you will understand when I say she was the kind of person you did not have to know well to like. If you had been at the public memorial, what you would have seen alongside those family and friends who truly grieve was the number of people whose lives were touched by hers, perhaps slightly, but who still felt the loss and wanted it to be marked somehow. It should be noted how gracious the family was in recognizing us.

For ours is a society that does not recognize loss very well. In the hierarchy of emotions, if I’m not grieving I should get over it, right? And it is true that if I thought of my emotions as grief rather than loss, as something close to that experienced by the family and friends, I came across as a heinous person. Because really, what is my grief next to theirs? What is my grief that it should deserve a public airing? Very simply, it isn’t a grief at all: I am at a loss, and alongside this loss is a longing for I know not what. We tend to view loss as something minor and trite, and it was this expectation I was banging my head against: I felt guilty for being so upset, and the guilt was showing up in my writing.

In “Sometimes a Voice (2)” McKay tells us that “Sometimes a voice … wants not to be a voice any longer and this longing / is the worst of longings.” Longing and loss have become nearly synonymous to my mind and, in light of McKay’s definition (“Longing: / a term for radical unwinding of the heart”), while we might not cherish the cause, that there is still room for such an unwinding of the heart is a source of comfort.

It isn’t muck-raking or melodrama or narcissism to say that while loss is not felt as keenly as grief, while it does not so interject in our lives, it does run deep. When genuine, it is not simply a manifestation of our overly effusive, self-help-addicted culture. No one is going into panegyrics here. The culture I’m asking for is the opposite of that, one in which people can feel decently because others are willing to do the same.

When I see the place where that house once stood I do not want to weep and wail, but I do feel like going for a very long walk. Homing.

For these and other poems by Don MacKay, see Camber: Selected Poems (McClelland & Steward, 2004).