I think a lot about Home from here. I try to define it, I worry about it being gone when I return. Home is home, I suppose -- but a year away has made it clear that you can never go back. The place to which I will be returning is not the place I left. I am happy to have a place to go. I know it will be familiar, sometimes painfully so -- but things have changed since I left, and there is no changing that. Home for me, is all those things that I take for-granted, that I call normal -- that I want more than anything, to return to.
The changes have hurt -- it is difficult to be so far away. They turn into worry. I worry about my grandmother. I worry about my brother. I worry about my parents. Mostly, I worry about my dad. It scares me that my grandma is so old, but she told me that she is waiting for me to get home. I get mad at her every time she morbidly reminds me of her own mortality -- not that I could deny it, not this year, anyhow. I worry that my brother might need me around, but then I think the best thing I could have done for him... was leave him to be the only child, just for a little while. I wish my mom would give herself a break sometimes, but I know that at least she is generally happy with what she does. She feels some sense of purpose. My dad though... I don’t know why he doesn’t take better care of himself. Walking around the lake is good... but it is only a part of the equation.
My grandpa died when I thought that I was too young for him to go and do that. He was old, and had been sick... but it wasn’t nearly time for me to graduate from high school let alone get married and have kids who he could teach to like their eggs scrambled and burnt and accompanied with toast and jam, just like he had taught me. I didn’t understand that it was okay for me to cry, and say good-bye to him. I didn’t want him to know that I thought he was going to die. I stayed up the night he died making chain decorations for our christmas tree with my brother. His chain was out of yellow paper, mine out of aluminum foil. We still hang them on our tree, but we didn’t this year. I was away from home.
My cousin by friendship died too young some years ago. We were just becoming ourselves. As children we went camping, played imaginary games, looked forward to Christmas Eve. I at least, always assumed that a whole big future stretched out in front of us. If we only saw one another on Christmas Eve, it was ok -- because the new year was close, and full of possibilities to make this year better than last. I didn’t say good-bye. When the too-young die, it doesn’t give you much warning. Only time to regret the person emerging who you’ll never get the chance to know. My mother knocked on my door, with that tone that strikes you with fear and worry... about your grandmother, your great uncle, anyone and everyone but your almost cousin. I felt somehow severed from reality -- we were two little girls who looked uncannily like our mothers; the matching set was disturbed by a poorly placed traffic light and simple, but deadly mistakes on a lonely Texas highway.
My uncle died a few months ago. I left without saying the kind of good-bye he deserved because I didn’t want to let on that I thought he was dying. At that time, he wasn’t ready to throw in the towel, so perhaps it was a wise decision on my part. I left with his blessing, but it hurt not to be home. It hurt not to be with everyone. It hurt not to be staying up all night alongside my mom and cousins and brother. I came the closest to saying goodbye on a phone call that I answered in a tiny room in shabby but love-filled hostel in the south of Chile. It was hailing outside. Neither of us was quite ready for good-bye, but I concentrated on every beautiful thing so hard that I nearly burst a blood vessel -- trying to get it somehow from this hemisphere to that.
A young man died a little while ago. We weren’t good friends, but he was part of what I consider home. Part of what I was afraid of losing. Part of what would have been gone either way (a solid group of friends, a routine of rock shows, dancing, house parties, donuts and the like). It upset me not just because he was a young man, a beautiful person, a good friend to people I care about, a part of that abstract concept of home -- but also because it made me think that if by some trick of fate it had been my father’s chromosomes that made him weak in just such a way...my father has been not taking good care of himself for a lot longer than that young man had the opportunity to live.
Its an odd way to bring this story around, but news from home combined with a friend’s journal entry just got me thinking about the same things that this young man’s death did.
No matter how much you need someone, expect someone to be there, think you can somehow beg for the time when you realize that time is up, fail to realize that a person is a part of what home means to you... that little bit of home can and will disappear.
I don’t think that my dad is going to die... but I do worry that he doesn’t realize how much it would hurt us all if he did. I don’t think he realizes how lucky he is to be alive and to have a home. While he’s smoking however many cigarettes a day he is back up to, and not eating as well as he should, and not seizing the day -- I don’t think he realizes how lucky he is to be part of what home means, even if only to a select few. In the end, somehow or another, we all manage to be fine. We know that he is imperfect, but he loves us. We don’t forget, but we forgive. My dad, however, has never learned to be as generous with himself, nor as forgiving of his own flaws, as we are.
