Say I Am Going Home

photo by John Cooper

On the last day in one of our temporary homes a package from my almost twenty-year-old daughter arrives. In it is a paper writ with scroll-embellished calligraphy. It says: “When I say I am going home, I mean I am going to where you are.” I draw in my breath. This has been the child who has had the most difficulty with being uprooted, mirroring my own ambivalence about being a gypsy. It’s been three years of traveling for us – from Seattle to California to France to another town in California, and now back to Seattle. It’s been three years where we’ve been choosing because of the Cancer, making the choices that could protect my husband while he recuperated, making choices that gave our daughter the opportunity to work with gifted voice teachers.

“I don’t know where I’m coming home to,” she said just before this Yule celebration, calling from her college apartment in snowy Indiana. “Sometimes you have to locate home within yourself,” I’d said. But then she knew I hadn’t grown up like that. She knew I’d left my childhood home as soon as I fell in love with a gangly boy-man at 17. I had located myself within his turbulent heart, and I’d stayed there mostly, venturing out for forays into Zen, brief flirtations with other men and women, writing retreats. He was my home so I could almost lose my mind talking with characters while a story formed. He was my home while I learned that I loved women, but not enough to live with them. He was my home while I almost drank to disappearance, and then reshaped my psyche by understanding what’s at stake in being true to oneself.

A therapist asked me once: “Do you think it might be dangerous to locate yourself within a man who has Cancer? I mean, maybe he needs his energy for his own healing.” And I hadn’t thought that I’d be a drain on him, that I’d be tiresome or depleting. I thought that he lived within me as much as I in him, but I’d never considered whether this was wrong. Because of his Cancer, and the inward river he had already set out on as he contemplated his second surgery, I started removing myself from him, piece by piece, a daily practice of energetic withdrawal. I stood by the shore while he drifted, silently floating toward some place I had never known, couldn’t envision.

It wasn’t until the surgery that his spirit had called me back. After the deadly cut that nicked his stomach and caused his insides to fill with blood, after they’d inserted the tube and begun bagging him to fill his lungs, after we’d all ridden down in the elevator to the second surgery of the night, I sat in the dark waiting room, its only sound the blaring of a television I was helpless to quiet, and chattered so loudly my teeth bit my tongue. My sister wrapped her arms around me to keep me warm, and still I shivered, my body inside his cold skin, offering my devotion, my radiance, my love. “I knew he was going to be okay because you suddenly shook me off and stood up, your chill finally resolved. I knew you were in there with him,“ my sister said, and I’d looked at her with such gratitude; my sister, the practical nurse who truly witnessed the unseen.

Three years later we did the unthinkable – we moved back to a place we had already been. We moved back because though we knew we were joined in Spirit, we had missing pieces that had to be completed by others. We had created a safe place to go out from for our daughter and our son, but we needed that for us too. My husband needed his patients, their ills and constraints, their sufferings and stories, so he could give back the healing that had been given him. I needed my writers, my dakini sisters, my adventurers, my soul friends. I say to them, the Seattle ones and the ones nearby, in Banff and Vancouver, “When I say I am going home, I mean I am going to where you are.”