Lost in transit

The Death of Home

If there is anything that will make an expat feel even more like a stranger in a strange land than she already does, it is a tragedy. Especially a senseless one.

Three weeks ago last night was the last time I saw my sweetheart, Hamish, alive. Three weeks ago tomorrow he was out running around in the park with some friends when his heart stopped beating. He was resuscitated and spent the next five days in a coma in an intensive care unit, but the massive and irreversible brain damage he had sustained from the loss of oxygen left him no chance of survival. I spent the better part of five days sitting in the hospital, alternately in a small waiting room with his father and brother (where I met them both for the first time), or sitting by his bed, holding his hand, petting his hair, and crying into the sheets. On the fifth day, his organs were harvested for donation and his life support was disconnected, and his body was allowed to die. His funeral was held the day before what would have been his 26th birthday.

Please forgive me if I have thrown these facts at you too bluntly. When all you have is questions with no answers — why did a healthy, active young man's heart simply stop beating for no discernible reason? how could he be gone only a month before we were to move into a new place together? how could I have someone so loving in my life for only seven months before losing him forever? — facts are one of the few things you have to hold on to. They are cold to the touch, solid and sharp-angled; they are not particularly comforting, it's true, but they are there, and they are all you have to help fill the gaping blank spaces.

One of the things I kept thinking all throughout the days in the hospital was, "Thank god we're in Australia." That's not to say that every other place in the world has such inferior medical care; I was just so thankful to be able to speak with the doctors and nurses in my native language. Had I been back in Prague, I don't know how easy it would have been to communicate with them; while I'm sure many of the staff in big hospitals there speak English quite well, there are always subtleties and sympathies that are harder to grasp across barriers of language and culture. I always have a bit of a cringe over being the typical Anglophone depending on the English of others to help me get by, but this is of course different: in an emergency, who wouldn't find it easier to talk to a native speaker of their own language?

But as glad as I am to be in a place where I can understand, and be understood, with virtually no difficulty, I still am ten thousand miles from home, with a sixteen-hour time difference between me and a familiar voice on the phone. While his family were all here together by coincidence (his brother lived here already and his parents had flown in from England only a week before for a holiday visit), all of my family and my oldest friends are back in New York. At one point in the hospital, a nurse asked me if I had "someone to talk to, for support"; I gestured to the young man lying unconscious between us and said, "Yes, I do — it's him." I'm lucky to have a few other friends here who have been very supportive and helpful, but mostly, I've been feeling very alone, no matter how many people I surround myself with.

When you are an expat, you have to obtain things anew that, living at home, you often just inherit, or have had so long that you don't even remember where they came from. When you moved into your own place for the first time, assuming you stayed in your own country, you probably didn't have to buy hangers or silverware or lightbulbs; your folks probably just came by with a box full of housewares for you, or perhaps you inherited them from a housemate. But when you have moved far from home, far from everyone you've known and everything you've owned, everything in your life must be found, or bought, or borrowed; everything is recent enough to know exactly how you got it, and what purpose — or usually, multiple purposes — they fulfill in your life. A few scrounged milk crates become your bedside tables and your shelving systems; when you're ready to move house again, you use them to carry what few possessions you have.

I had known Hamish in person for only four months, but we had a deep bond that grew out of similar situations. We were both foreigners here, students at the same university; we had both left everything and everyone we knew at home to carve out a new life for ourselves on the other side of the world. When you migrate, you learn to make do with fewer things, fewer people, less money; we helped each other find cheap furniture and cheap dinners. He filled in the gaps in my life where my old family and friends had been, one person who filled in for the absence of many others. We used to joke that each was the closest person we had in an entire hemisphere. In a land where I had no family, he became my family. He was my best friend. My bed warmer. My confidante. My dinner partner. My drinking buddy. My sweetheart.

Now here I am, in this strange country so familiar and yet so foreign at the same time, and wonder if I can stand to stay here any longer. Part of me wants to abandon my school program, leave all the bad memories behind and run back home, but I no longer know where "home" is.

I used to think home was a place; but after spending the last five years moving between four cities on three continents, I now know differently.

Home is not a location. Home is people.

Posted by wildsoda at November 11, 2005 01:44 PM