Homecoming

Today I am leaving after three days at Advent Hospital.

The discharge ritual has me in tears. I am grateful for a moment to breathe and write.

Here is the counting thing again. I wish I had kept track of the number of discharges—it would give more impact to the story. Do you think we had fifty to seventy-five hospital discharges? Seventy-five to one hundred? More than one hundred?

I don’t know the number. I just know it was a fucking lot of discharges, and that they were always stressful—the absolute opposite of a healing transition.

“Going home” is a phrase repeated countless times on discharge day.

At some point during every discharge, there would be a comment or question about going home that pricked my heart, reminding me how badly you wanted to go home. You came to this country hoping to make life better for your family back in Colombia. Yes, you lived here in North Carolina—but Colombia was your home.

From the time of your diagnosis, you were unable to return because of the risks of brain swelling during air travel and your fragile health. How badly you wanted to go home.

During every discharge, that loss would wash over me as we packed belongings and waited, or made phone calls and waited, or wrangled logistics and waited. I would silently hold my pricked heart and stifle my tears.

Now I’m thinking that may not have been the most skillful approach.

I told myself I was protecting you. I thought you wouldn’t want to be reminded of how much your life had changed because of the brain tumor. Why would I bring up that loss? Why would I remind you that you couldn’t ever really go home again?

As an Asheville native, I keep thinking I should make a Thomas Wolfe connection—You Can’t Go Home Again—but I don’t quite have the resources to pull it off here. I didn’t even know until a Writing to Heal class held at his homeplace that Wolfe died young, from tuberculosis of the brain. I remember standing beside a life-size photo of him, reading about his illness, learning he was six foot six and only thirty-seven when he died. It was in that class that I first heard the prompt I want to tell you.

Now I wish I had asked if you wanted to talk about it.

Perhaps we could have honored your courage in coming here. Honored your courage in facing life with a brain tumor. Honored your love for your home country.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped being the person who overshared—who dragged “what are you feeling?” into every conversation. Over our long saga, I may have changed a little in that way with other people. But I fear I changed a lot with you.

I can’t undo that now.

I will just add it to the pile of storm wreckage and debris accumulating on the street.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.” — Rumi