Lost in transit

Being Here

So now I've lived through another Expat Experience. My grandmother died this week, and I was unable to attend either her deathbed or her funeral.

This was a fear that I had before I first moved away three years ago, to Prague. Except I was worried that it would happen with my father. (Still am, which is one of the reasons I don't want to settle in Australia.) I was seeing a counsellor at the time, who pointed out that I could be four blocks away from my father when he died and still be unable to say goodbye to him, so it wouldn't be so different if I were four thousand miles away, really.

Except that it is, of course. Of course it is. Had I been in Prague I might have missed Grandma's dying, but I could have least hopped on a plane and been back in seven hours, for the funeral. Sure, it would have cost a couple of hundred bucks, but you allow for things like that. And you can feasibly go from Europe to New York for a weekend. Being in Australia, though, means about 24 hours of transit, plus a couple of thousand dollars for a fare. And I'm already going back in another week for my father's birthday – exchanging a week of classes for five days of jetlag hell so I can be with him for his milestone party, tickets bought months ago in anticipation.

So like it or not, there was just no way for me to get back there. My family did their best to keep me involved. My aunt played my voicemail messages for Grandma in the hospital; she was being kept lightly sedated, but (I'm told) a tear ran down her cheek when she heard my voice. I was asked to write a little piece for the funeral, which my uncle read out for me. But would he get the timing right? Or the Yiddish pronunciations? It's not the same, having your words read out by someone else, someone who won't know exactly where the rhythm lies, where the pauses and the emphases go. It's not the same, knowing your words are being read out to people whose faces you can't see. It's not the same, knowing that everyone else in your family will share an experience that you won't.

"In a way it's good you didn't see her at the end," my mother said. "She was so frail and weak it would have broken your heart." But who cares how I would have felt? I would have sat there to hold her hand so she felt better, or at least not so scared, or so alone. I would have been there to make it easier for my aunt and my mother and my uncle: to get coffee, walk the dog, drive the car, find the nurse. I would have been there with my family at the cemetery, to watch them return the body of my last remaining grandparent to the earth, to put the pebbles on Grandpa's headstone, to gather with the surviving members of my shrinking family one more time. To say goodbye to my favourite grandma, who was buried wearing the black-and-white beaded necklace I made for her before I moved away.

I would have been there just to be there. But because of this life I chose, I could only be here.

Posted by wildsoda at October 8, 2006 03:52 PM