When the Person Who Was 'Home' Is Gone

For queer people, home is often something we build rather than inherit. After losing his father, Andrew Stillman had to learn what that really meant.

Published: March 4, 2026 | Last Updated: March 4, 2026

When I returned to my San Diego apartment after my father's funeral, I no longer knew what "home" meant. I hadn't even had a full month in the rental before I lost him. The kitchen still smelled like fresh paint. The wood floors hadn't had a chance to get dirty. Nothing in that one-bedroom knew what had just happened to me.

In the months before I moved, I had spoken to my father every morning on long walks with my dog. We’d spent the last few years repairing a relationship that once felt fragile, and I’d stopped in Oregon to see him before I made my way south. When I left, he told me it would probably be the last time I’d ever see him. I laughed it off. Now I stood among half-unpacked boxes in the silence of a space I barely knew, and the one person I’d have called for support was gone.

I remember standing there with my keys still in my hand, unsure what to do next. Unpack? Shower? Sleep? Grief makes even the smallest decisions feel impossible. I had looked forward to a whole new life in a brand new city, but all of that shattered when I realized I didn’t have anyone here to lean on yet, and I’d have to navigate this alone. I scrolled through my call list with tears in my eyes as I came to terms with the fact I’d never see or talk to him again.

For a lot of queer people, “home” is already a complicated word, and parental relationships can be the hardest to untangle. For the latter, I consider myself lucky, but it wasn’t always that way. Like many of us, I learned that “belonging” is something we may have to build ourselves. After spending so much effort to rebuild my relationship with my father, however, his loss cracked open a deeper question I was not prepared for:

If home is tied to a person, what happens when that person is no longer here?

I didn’t have the answer, but I did know that I could not sit still inside my grief. The apartment felt too quiet. My thoughts screamed too loudly. He was never meant to live here with me, but I’d assumed he would remain a voice on the other end of my morning walks, a steady presence in a city that still felt unfamiliar. I needed somewhere to put the pain that wasn’t a phone screen or a bottle or another sleepless night. I started replacing “phone call time with Dad” with my yoga mat on the living room floor. Not because I was strong or disciplined, but because I didn’t know what else to do.

For a lot of queer people, “home” is already a complicated word, and parental relationships can be the hardest to untangle. For the latter, I consider myself lucky, but it wasn’t always that way. Like many of us, I learned that “belonging” is something we may have to build ourselves.

Before his death, I’d been following free classes from Breathe and Flow on YouTube. The teachers behind the channel offered me a steady, strong, no-nonsense approach that made it feel accessible when everything else felt impossible. I decided to join their platform for longer classes that included breathwork and meditation to help me cope. I didn’t show up seeking enlightenment, but rather to “be with” people who taught me where to breathe, how to flow and when to rest.

Over time, the mat became more than a distraction. It became a routine. Then a ritual. Then a small return to myself. In a city where I didn’t know anybody, the practice gave my days shape and my body a place to land. It was the first room in my new definition of “home.”

The more I practiced, the less yoga felt like an activity and the more it felt like a path I needed to take to share with others. Class after class, breath after breath, I noticed my grief turn into little morsels of strength. What began as a coping mechanism wound up becoming a calling.

After many practices that left me broken and crying on my mat, I recognized the healing the practice brought to me. That recognition led me to enroll in yoga teacher training through Yoga Renew, which wasn’t something I would have imagined for myself before the season of loss. I didn’t enter the training to become an expert, but to find a way to understand that what had helped me through my grief could be a practice I shared with someone else who may feel trapped in a quiet apartment, wondering how to get through the night.

Butterfly 1 — Andrew J. Stillman found comfort on the mat after his father died. Courtesy photo

During my teacher training, I took a job at the reopening of a beloved piano bar in Hillcrest. Having grown up in Yosemite, I never had an opportunity to be surrounded by other gay men. Working behind the bar meant I wasn’t just watching the community. I was part of its nightly rhythm. I learned their names, and they learned mine. The restaurant only lasted a few months, but the friendships outlived it. They became the anchor that helped me understand what a chosen family is and shaped my life here. Through them, my definition of home shifted. It had less to do with where I slept and everything to do with where I felt seen.

Years later, I channeled that same instinct toward ritual and comfort into small, tangible things, including launching my own candle business. I couldn’t see it at the time of loss, but the real foundation came on the mat, in the height of my grief, where I learned how to sit and stay with my emotions instead of running away from them every time they surfaced.

“Home,” I learned, is not only where you start. Sometimes, it is what you build after everything familiar is gone. It lives in chosen family, in shared breath, in practices that hold you when people cannot. Mine began again on a yoga mat in a half-empty apartment, and it keeps expanding every time I help someone else find steady ground inside their own storm.