New York -Intermission- “Home Coming”

My uncle Jamie asked me once “when do you think you are going to be a real New Yorker.” I didn’t know how to answer that question until today. You are a New Yorker when you reach a place where you don’t feel like you can call any place else home.

Without mom this place, this town, this state is the place my family lives and a place I need to keep coming back to in order to see the people that I love but I can’t call it home anymore without lying to my instincts.

That being said it’s time I went back home. With the generosity of family and friends I have just enough to get back. I’ll go back with the attitude I entered the city with “I’ll figure it out.” I don’t know if my apartment is still waiting for me but I know my job and my friends there are and that’s all I need to keep chasing this dream.

I’ve seen tragedy bring out the very worst in the nature of some of those closest to me. I have also seen it bring together a family that seemed to be tied together by the very thread that was cut a week ago. And while the world around me is clamoring to ideals and practicalities that don’t really matter in the wake of this tragedy I am setting my sites on the prize my mother was so proud of me for chasing.

I will forever carry a tundra of melancholy, it will follow me for the rest of my life where ever I may roam. The absence of my mother will continue to fill me with a sense of displacement, and a consistent sorrow. She will live on in those closest to her and while I take comfort in that I also remember the words of CS Lewis. In a way of paraphrase he says that grief is not something you can get over, not in the case of a lost loved one. Grief is something that becomes a part of you, it becomes a partner of yours, it is part of your journey and when you can accept that than you can move on.

I’m not waiting for an esoteric revelation to kick me back in the game. I’m just going to make the decision and accept the fact that I have to live with this hole in my heart and move on. I’m going back to New York this week and I’m doing it feeling less protected than I ever have before. I’m doing it because mom would have wanted that. I’m doing that in spite of my lost motivation brought on by this depression. I’m doing it because really what else am I going to do?

New York is home now...and I want to go home.

I love you all

KH-