Home and Not Home

I’m back in Brooklyn this week visiting family for the holidays, back in the same house I lived in for many years. Coming home to America, New York and Brooklyn after living in Berlin for a year provokes complex feelings. On one level there is the simple pleasure of seeing family, especially my sister and her husband’s new baby. There is the comforting feeling of being in a familiar place with familiar landmarks. And then there are the strange feelings of disconnection and dislocation. Driving back into Brooklyn after being away, this time for about six months, I’m aware of seeing it through different eyes. The airport, the highway, the people driving crazily.

Compared to Europe, America feels a bit run down and ragged. Everything looks a bit dusty and bruised. Europe has these aspects too, but feels less shabby and neglected overall. Is this the corrolary to the freedom we love? To our mistrust of centralized government? A kind of extra swirling entropy, chewing at the edges of things? When you’re swimming in the water of America every day it’s hard to see, but coming back in, it’s visible and slightly shocking. New York is particularly this way, big, messy, noisy, dirty and sublime as it is. But I feel that somehow this is in our American DNA, this kind of sloppy dangerousness.

Before coming back, I was listening, partly in an act of homesickness for New York radio, to an interview by Krista Tippett on her On Being podcast. She was interviewing an ‘expert on ambiguous loss’ named Pauline Boss. Boss is a family therapist who specializes in treating patients who have suffered open-ended losses, like the disappearance of a loved one. The title of the show was ‘The Myth of Closure’ which is what got me interested to listen. Closure is one of those words that we throw around casually ‘I just needed some closure’ at the end of a romantic relationship, for example. But in fact what we are talking about is a desire for an end to sadness. Real sadness, however, never really ends, it just recedes into the background and becomes smooth and familiar. It no longer hurts in this startling arresting way that prevents us from functioning, but it remains. In recent years I’ve come to think of two groups of people, those who’ve experienced real loss and those who haven’t. Mainly it’s a way of thinking about how humble a person is. Real loss is humbling in it’s reminder of our powerlessness in the universe. That the things we love can be taken away at any moment. That we may try our best but still suffer and fail.

In the interview Tippett discusses with Boss the loss of home that immigrants experience, and this resonated with me. I have a real affection for Berlin, and do feel at home there in a certain regard. But New York City is my home of homes, the home of my dreams and my deepest self. Whether I’ll ever live here again I don’t know, but it will always be my home. And in that there is a source of persistent, if soft, sadness. The loss of home, of that familiar, comfortable place. The things I miss about New York, beyond the obvious like family and friends, are small but important. I miss certain foods terribly. I miss that comfortable and easy relationship to the city’s culture, the knowing of cultural reference points, music, fashion, the voices on the radio. I miss the radio station Hot 97. I miss that feeling of easy, fluid connection to a place that I definitely do not have in Berlin. Everything in Berlin must be puzzled out and understood. Weird German slang or idiomatic speech, the social meaning of neighborhoods, what’s on the front page of the newspaper? It’s all alien and therefore lightly alienating, a kind of cognitive overhead.

And then there is the strangeness of going back and forth. The immigration officer says to me and my sons “Welcome home guys” but we are not going home, although in one sense of course we are. And arriving back in Berlin is also strange. We have left one home to return to another. Do we feel relieved and comforted? Or something else?