Issue 89. The Journey Home

When my father started to lose his memory, it was as if he gained an entirely new set of memories. He remembered travels to Egypt that he had never taken, visits to France with his father (who had died when my father was 14) and explorations of India and Hong Kong. Wherever we took him, he recognized as a place he used to live many years ago. The house he and his father built — he was pretty sure — lay just beyond that hill, or around that corner.  My father died nearly 13 years ago, and now it’s my mother’s memory that no longer quite works. But she is planning a journey.  She wants to go home.  She waits for the bus that will arrive to take her as far as the home of her aunt and uncle in Philadelphia, who will surely be happy to put her up overnight, and she thinks of other places she can stop on the way home. All these stops are with family and friends who have long since passed away.  And no matter that we are there to visit her, she seems to believe that she is visiting us. This is not her home, and there seems no way to make it such.  

I-95, heading north

As my husband and I drive back north on the same route we took last week down to visit my mother in Florida, we both fully agree that it’s good to be going home.  But the journey home is also quieter and more reflective than the journey away from home. We still notice a few new things along the way, but we mostly recognize places we’ve seen before.  Mostly we think about where we’ve been and about what we’ll do now, after we get home. This is a transition place, or at least we treat it as such. And there is more than a touch of sadness to it. 

I think many study abroad students also experience this sadness on their flights home, perhaps especially those who may have felt ready for some time to go home. Homesickness happens to many people, but going home never really erases that experience, nor does it exactly promise a new beginning in the way that going away from home sometimes does. Going home concludes the journey and re-establishes our connection with this place. Driving home from Florida, we had many moments when we said, “Now we are home.” First when we reached the familiar places on the New Jersey turnpike we knew we were close and with each familiar landmark or recognizable space we renewed our feeling of being home. We identify ourselves as part of this place, and our lives move in this space and among the people here.     

For some reason, as the New Year begins, it is common in the English-speaking world to sing a song from a Scottish poet about not forgetting old acquaintances and times gone by. I feel the same nostalgia with the old Beatles’ song that goes “There are places I remember….”  My mother remembers her aunt’s house where she lived for a while as a young woman before she was married. She remembers that she was a student at Southern College, a boarding school in Virginia that disappeared long ago, so sometimes she supposes she is there now, and that the school year will soon be over and she will be going home. So she asks again when the bus will come, the one that goes past that house in Bowling Green. Knowing that these places no longer exist, and that these people are long gone, I am the one, not her, to feel their absence. And I dearly wish that I could drive her home.