You Can Never Really Go Home Again

I've been intrigued for a long time by the famous Thomas Wolfe line "You can never go home again." Home is that elusive place-in-time (or, in physics, point-in-space/time) that once was, but can never be the same again. It's not just a physical location. Sure, you can go to the place that was once your home; in fact, you may live in the exact same house or at least the same city in which you were born. But 'home', as in that place-in-time where you thought of yourself as 'being at home' was once, but can never be again, the same place. It has changed, just like you have changed. The 'you' who goes there is not the 'you' who once thought of that place, in that time, as home. It can become a complex analysis, breaking each component of the sentence and the concept down into constituent parts.

I was reminded of the sentence this morning when I was talking with an old friend from Albuquerque, where I lived for 29 years of my adult life. I was born into and lived my childhood in a military family, so I have never been 'from' a specific place (we lived in 7 U.S. states and possessions and two foreign countries). There is no 'this is my home' sense, for me, in the same way that people who grow up in a town, from birth until they leave their parent's house. I now live in St. Louis, Missouri and I meet a lot of people who were born here, have lived here their whole life, and fully intend to die here. This is their 'home', and though they have changed, and St. Louis has changed, they have that 'sense of home' in a stronger and more 'stable' way than I can ever manifest. Nevertheless, when I reached 17 years of age, I moved to New Mexico to go to college (because my mother was from there and my parents had residency in the state, hence schooling was less expensive). After a year in Socorro at the School of Mines, I moved to and lived in Albuquerque until 1998, when I moved to St. Louis. So, in the sense of 'a singular place where I spent the majority of my life', Albuquerque is my primary home, with St. Louis my second home.

This Christmas, I sent a gift of a book on the history of the Missouri Botanical Gardens to a number of different friends whom I'd met over the years (most of them in New Mexico). I sent it sort of 'out of the blue' -- no one expected a present from me, and indeed I had never before sent them a Christmas gift. But I did it this year as an 'incentive' for them to remember me and to give serious thought to come and visit me in my second home city; in fact, I stated such, quite directly, in my letter to them. As those friends have called to thank me for the gift, we have had a chance to 'catch up' on the events that have transpired in our mutual lives. And, lo and behold (I say that as a small bit of surprise, given how each of us gets involved in our lives wherever-we-are) 'life happens' to your friends [and the rest of the world] when you're living your own life. My friend in Albuquerque was telling me about how his wife of 30 years has developed ALS and is slowly physically deteriorating from the condition. That put me in a bit of a melancholy mood, and made me sad that I hadn't been there to live through all the years with them as the close friends they had been when I lived in Albuquerque. But, of course, none of us can be in more than one place at a time. We can only live our lives wherever-we-are, and be aware of, somewhat tangentially, the lives of others at a distance.

That got me to thinking about the journeys that immigrants have taken throughout history. I remember reading about how, when Europeans left the 'Old World' for the 'New' (America), they knew they were unlikely to ever see their families again. And how this was true for early settlers of the American West, when they left their families back East. Or what refugees experience when they leave war-torn countries to immigrate to a new country to raise their families in relative peace. There is always the probability they will never again see the families or friends who constituted their 'home'. They are, indeed, moving elsewhere to establish a new 'home', for themselves and their families, to establish a different 'place-in-time' where they can once again create a 'sense of home'.

Nowadays, with computers and the Internet, the ability to keep track of family and old friends is more resilient. You don't even have to wait until someone replies to a letter; you can call them on the phone or write them an email, and 'instantaneously' reconnect. But, of course, it's not quite the same thing as 'being there', nor of having lived in the same town and had the experience of interacting on a regular basis. It's surely better than what immigrants have had for most of human history, no doubt about it. It's a much quicker connection and you can ever write to people at 3 in the morning, when you can't sleep and know that, via email, you can send them a note which they will read at their leisure. And that casual ability to keep connections alive, even while living your busy life elsewhere, is truly a wonderful gift of technology.

There is another level, though, of 'never going home again' for people who are recovering from trauma. The journey of recovery takes one (hopefully, if there is forward movement) far afield from the 'home' where one's trauma occurred. And, indeed, the point of being in recovery is to move quite far away from the original home. In the case of recovery, the hope is that one won't be able to come home again, at least in the sense of the home where the trauma took place. That's a 'home' you want to leave far behind. But, at the same time, like any immigrant, you want to establish a new 'sense of home' in a place where you can find relative peace. And that 'place-in-time' may also be a 'place inside your soul' where one can experience safety in a way that was never possible in the original 'home'.

There were, indeed, many aspects of my life in my military family that I never want to 'go home again' to, just as there were with my life in Albuquerque (or even life here in St. Louis). I'm nostalgic for the good times, the warm loving experiences with my friends, and the intermittent happy times with my family-of-origin, but surely I'd like to move beyond, and never return to, the negative events, the years of deep depression, and the long years of painful struggle involved with recovering from the sexual, physical and emotional trauma.

So, though none of us can 'ever really go home again', on some levels we wouldn't want to, and on other levels we wish we could. It's complex. That 'place-in-time' isn't what it 'used to be'. We're different, it's different, life has moved on, we've gotten older. But if we can create a safe and resilient 'place in our souls' that is, for us, 'home', then we can carry our 'sense of home' around with us wherever we are, forever.