No direction home
No direction home. This suggests there is a home, but no way get back to it. It’s a ‘You’re on your own’ caution for travelers. A badge of honor, too, if you can make it.
The grieving already know they’re on their own. For them, home may be the place where they try to make it, a bastion against a world that grief has revealed to them as a cheap movie set with fine homes and buildings that are nothing but plywood facades with a coat of paint, and people who scurry in and out of them and never seem to get it. But then again, a family living in the house of grief may fall apart, not stick together. Or may not feel safe in their neighborhood. Or were already marginalized for any one of a slew of offenses—poverty, color of skin, other signs that betray their ‘difference’—before grief arrived and so, home for them is just one more plywood façade on the movie set.
No direction home. The phrase may imply there are directions, but good luck trying to find them. Trying to find my way now in Durham, I’ve wondered how I gained a sense of direction in New Haven, a city where I lived or worked or both for decades. Habit and repetition, I suppose, building a model in my head brick by brick. Places I lived there. Other landmarks that grounded me. Among homes, Cold Spring Street, where I rented a room in the house of a man who became a mentor to me. Dwight Street, where I was a live-in staff member at a psychiatric halfway house. George Street with my partner, and a baby on the way. Other landmarks? Whalley Avenue, which Dwight runs off of, is next to Goffe Street, which is next to Dixwell Avenue. The three are named after judges who sentenced King Charles I to death in 1649, then fled to America. How do you forget that, and where the streets are?
In grief, though, it’s not clear where you’re going. There are marker points—‘Today is one year since . . . ’ or ‘This is the first time we’ve been out to dinner since . . . ’—but there are few directions. I wonder, though, if grief, which exposes the non-grieving world to the grieving as a sham, may also whisper to them in their dreams that movie set or not, the world is still here. What if grief has two hearts, two minds, two assignments? We know the first assignment—to reveal the nakedness of our loss. The second may be to give us a glimpse of what we might come back to, changed by grief, not forsaking the one we grieve, but part of the world again.
There’s another possibility— that grief learns, studies, mulls over its judgment of the world, considers that while the dinners that friends brought over each evening for a week or two stopped, they did happen, and that while many friends were concerned only for your welfare, as though the one whose loss you grieve never existed, a few said they miss your child, or spouse, or parent, too.
Grief is the direction home.
