Who Asked? // How do we get home?

“There’s no place like home.” 

Everyone I know is talking about the new “Wicked” movie, based on “The Wizard of Oz,” a story famously oriented around the protagonist’s journey home from a different fantastical world. As we find ourselves in the midst of the holiday season, people across the country will return to their childhood homes for family dinners and gift exchanges. Home seems to be on many people’s minds as 2024 comes to a close. 

On a more personal note, my grandmother has recently found herself away from her home after a medical emergency. From the hospital, to rehab, to likely a nursing home, she will never find herself back in the house she lived in for over 50 years. With this change has come the quick onset of worsening dementia. What used to be a hint here and there, like personifying her cane, has turned into anger and delusion. One minute she thinks I’m engaged and the next she’s accusing my father of coming into our lives to steal her house, not realizing he’s been married to my mother for 27 years. 

Even in the midst of her deterioration, my 92-year-old grandmother cannot let go of the fact that she wants to go back home, insisting that she can live independently. The truth is that my mother has been working every day for years to let her keep living in that house. The truth is that if my grandmother had agreed to go to an assisted living facility when we first suggested it, she wouldn’t be finding herself in the situation she’s in now — blind and deaf and confused, but certain that it’s everyone else’s fault. The idea of staying in her house was enough to keep her staunchly defiant of our suggestions for years, and now, away from home, this disconnect has led to a rapid crumbling of sanity. 

So what makes home so important to us? Is it as simple as our address? Is home where we grew up? Or perhaps it’s more abstract — the people we love rather than four walls. And no matter what it is, if home is truly so valuable, how do we get there? We don’t all get ruby slippers, after all. 

First off, we cannot figure out how to get home if we don’t know what it is. That may be simpler than it sounds, if only because I’m going to be extremely and conveniently vague. 

Home is whatever we decide. Now, before you roll your eyes at my platitude, hear me out. I know people who feel safest in their childhood bedroom, and many more who don’t feel like their true selves anywhere near their hometown. And what do we say to military brats who have lived in eight different cities before puberty? Which one counts as their real home? I have felt home in the embrace of my mother and in the laughs of people I don’t talk to anymore. 

Briefly, home was my high school’s fine arts theater that I spent hours in for rehearsals. Home sounds like crashing waves on my favorite beach, and I will always have some version of home wherever my parents are. I will be home when I meet up with friends I haven’t seen in months and I will be home walking into my kitchen to my roommate making ravioli in an impossibly small pot. I will be home where I love and am loved.

You would think with this perspective that I always feel at home. Why even bother finding it? On the contrary, this impermanence of home drives me wild. 

College was always a terrifying concept to me. I couldn’t imagine leaving the place I’d always known. And I didn’t, really. I chose to go to school only 30 minutes away from the house I grew up in. In my freshman year, I went home basically every other weekend, but looking back on it, I regret the things I missed out on — shows I didn’t get to be part of and hangouts I wasn’t invited to. Because I missed my home so much, I wasn’t able to build a new one. I was too busy feeling torn in two. 

My homes have moved away from me, have decayed into nothing, have been carted off in pieces, have deleted me from their photos. The part of me that was at home in my grandmother’s living room, eating ice cream and watching old movies, will never go home again. My grandma didn’t realize that whether she was in a white brick three bedroom or a one-room apartment with other old people, she still would’ve been home, because she still would’ve had my mother and father and sister and me. We’re her only real home left. Instead, she’s become twisted by anger and confusion, years of buried resentments and self-made narratives. 

The only way to truly get home is to accept it will always be changing. It is certainly not a building. Or, maybe, it is all of them. It is everywhere we have ever belonged and ever will, and we can only feel that belonging if we let go of what ties us to the past. We can’t let fear and stubbornness drown us. Know that if we lose one home, we will find another. There will still be laughter and love and peace. 

With all of this in mind, I am watching my sister hug my grandmother goodbye, and there is lucidity for a moment. My grandmother says, through jumbled words, “Remember who loves you?” It’s our traditional call and response, has been for as long as I can remember. My sister dutifully replies “You,” and my grandmother smiles. “We used to have such fun, y’know? We’d play games?” Her wrinkled face is shining for a moment, remembering stuffed animal doctors and checkers tournaments with us on rainy days. She has found a way home, if only briefly. 

It’s never been magic shoes or a GPS. It was always love.