You Can't Go Home Again?

On finding home outside of your country. In my case, Istanbul.

Okay, so this story happened to a friend of a friend.

I heard it one Thanksgiving night, in Istanbul, several years ago.

My friend had invited my wife and I over for dinner. His recently divorced or remarried friend, Paul, was also there. We were a surrogate family on this traditional American family holiday thousands of miles from the US.

Paul, in his 70s, was visibly feeling down - drinking heavily, moping in his chair. We asked what was wrong and he started to cry, then immediately choked back his tears and forced a smile.

His brother had just died back. The funeral was back in New York and his other brother had asked Paul not to come. It was a family decision and the brother was informing Paul. They didn't want him there. He had spent too much time away, they felt. When his brother was diagnosed with cancer, he had not dropped his life in Turkey and rushed home to be at his brother's side. They had taken care of him, stayed at his bedside through hospice, held his hand as he died. They felt Paul had betrayed them and let them down. So, he did not deserve to be there.

Paul himself said his brother and he had been close to the very end. They spoke on Skype and wrote each other's emails. When they were younger, they were inseparable. "No one else in the family understood me," Paul says. "Or him for that matter. We were everything to each other. My brother WAS home."

Paul had been in Turkey since the early 90s. He had grown children here. His career is here – over twenty five years of teaching. Not going home for his brother's long illness was a painful decision, I'm sure, but completely understandable.

"My brother understood it," he says. "But the rest of them don't give a shit. With him gone, there's nothing to tie me to the States."

I wonder if the family would have given the same reaction if Paul had been in, say, Texas or California or Washington, some other far-from-New-York-yet-still-the-USA place?

Another story was told to me by a friend who lived in Vietnam. He is one of my only readers so he can correct my mistakes, as the details are foggy. The gist of it was, there was an American woman living in Ho Chi Minh City. This must have been back in the 90s. She had lived there so long that she grew old there and Alzheimer's set in. She began to live outside, sleeping in vacant lots or on the street. Her old Vietnamese friends and neighbors brought her essentials – food, water and clothing – but no one knew if there was family back in the States to contact, and she could no longer tell them because she didn't know either. She remembered zilch. When she died, she died anonymous and though not alone, alone in terms of fellow Americans.

This marks my seventeenth year in Turkey. Seventeen years! What does it mean to be out of your own country for that long? What is home? When I dream of a home it often looks like this picture, but this hasn't been part of my lived experience for over 30 years now as I left Florida at 21.

For my Kurdish language studies I was listening to a podcast today on housing prices and the host interviewed a real estate agent who said this: "Due to the economic crisis in our country, the market has frozen. Our people cannot buy or sell houses at all." At first the words "our country" (welatê me) settled over me like a news report about a foreign nation, or at least about a nation I was not really a part of but only a temporary guest. But then I realized, of course, that I had bought a house here. I rented here. I had a family here, a little boy I had to help provide shelter for. The prices and economics of THIS country affected me and had been affecting me for almost two decades. I was part of that "our" in the sentence of that no matter how others saw me or how even I saw myself.

Striding the divide between two countries is a strange place to be. People back home can cut you off and feel betrayed, like in Paul's situation. I doubt they would have been so angry and vengeful if he had lived in, say, Florida, as opposed to Turkey. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I think that though they might still have criticized him for not coming back to New York to help nurse his brother, the drastic cutting off would not have happened. You can also be cut off through no fault of your own, like the American woman with Alzheimer's in Vietnam. She become completely Vietnamese in a way, dependent wholly on the land on which she lived, without even memory to sustain a connection to her old home.

I mean to explore in the coming months what it means to make a home abroad. My last post was part of that. Can your foreign country ever be truly home? Does how people look at you help determine that answer? What keeps you tied to your country of origin, people's feelings or memory or something else? What ties you to your new country? Is it home?

If any of you live abroad and wrestle with these questions, please drop a comment.

I'm curious. Maybe everyone else just shrugs and rolls with it?