Heading Back Home to a Place Where I Don’t Belong

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

—Robert Frost

I.

On the plane ride home our grievance fares get my niece and me two aisle seats separated by half a dozen rows. A part of me wishes she were there to talk with through the long journey home but a part’s relieved that I can sit in silence and turn over in my mind all that’s happened, happening, still to come.

My father dead more than two years. My mother ten days. I’m an orphan now. And though in one sense they live on inside of me and in others, still it strikes me once we no longer can embody, enshrine their memory then they’ll have completely disappeared. So much, then, for immortality.

II

While I’ve been away, the neighbors were minding my dog. He’s aging, but healthy as far as I know. Yet in midflight the knowledge suddenly comes to me with dread and terrible certainty that he too will die within the year. I don’t know it yet, but that fall he’ll get lymphoma, his poor paw swelling up

to four times its size before he goes. The night before that day he’ll lie unmoving on the kitchen floor, moaning so much I’ll come and sleep beside him, cradle him in my arms, and in the morning carry him off to the vet where men will take him from me, then come and tell me he too is dead.

III.

After my father died, whenever I strolled with my dog through the nearby walk streets of Venice I felt some sort of presence seeming to hover in the air. Was he there? It comforted me to think so and I talked to him ever so quietly— about what I can’t remember now. I wondered too how much he knew now

about things I’d kept from him while he lived. After my mother died, she appeared in my father’s stead, and when I asked whether he’d be coming back as well her silence told me what to expect. When my dog died, I wondered if he might take her place. But instead no one, no dog. And soon I stopped walking there.

IV

Now, though, as the plane hits the runway hard, I know none of that, or what else may come. I only know that I’m home at last in a place I’ve never quite felt at home and missing my parents terribly whom I all too seldom went to see when they still lived. Much too busy, it seemed, living my much more interesting life.

My niece and I catch a cab to my house, then I drive her home. Return to my place and collect the dog. He’s delighted I’m back, doesn’t care where I’ve been. The neighbors, kind, say the right few words. That evening the dog sleeps at my feet, and nothing has changed for him at all. But everything, everything’s changed for me.

V

After our father died, my sister told someone how shocking it had been. How old was he? her colleague inquired. Eighty-six, she said. And you weren’t expecting him to pass away soon? Well, but not quite yet, my sister explained. Our mother’s death less of a surprise, but we still weren’t ready at all.

Life goes on, they say. Until it doesn’t. My marriage died many years ago. It felt like a death, somewhere deep inside. Now my parents are gone. No children of my own, I live alone, wonder what my remaining years have in store here in L.A., land of surf and sun where every day I wake up alone.

VI

What does it mean to live, to have lived? How did my parents feel when their own parents died, and those parents before them, losing the ones who gave them life? How will I feel if I die with...