Why You Never Stop Longing for Home

My mother is eighty-five and she is dying. I’m sitting beside her in a shared hospital room, holding her hand, reassuring her, because she’s scared of leaving everyone she’s ever loved.

A few days before I arrived, something unexpected happened. It began when an eighty-nine-year-old man was wheeled into the bed beside hers, a recent immigrant from a country neighboring the one she’d left fifty-five years ago. The way he spoke, quick to emotion, and the familiar tones of his language, deep, guttural, reminded her of her own grandfather.

Then, his family came to visit…

The Family Village: How Most of the World Still Lives

The old man’s family arrived by the handfuls, sons, daughters, and grandchildren, filling the room with voices and laughter and the smells of food from home; feeding the old man chicken noodle soup and sharing his sweet desserts with everyone who entered (attending nurses, on-call doctors, my own mother and father). This family arrived at all hours, the same way you might come if this was your own home (confident you’re always welcome, never needing to knock). They stayed much too long and spoke far too loudly, keeping my mother awake late into the night. But my mother never minded any of it. Quite the contrary.

The old man’s family created a felt sense of company and aliveness, and they did something larger and older: they rebuilt the sensory world of the village my mother had long ago left behind, reawakening a version of herself formed in childhood, never fully gone, shaped by her homeland. Her memories rushed in, from time spent in her family village made up of grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins living under the same roof, she the youngest of them all, the gleam in her father’s eye and the tag-along behind her older siblings and cousins.

My mother’s childhood family village is still how most of the world lives. Across much of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East — despite the same economic development that led the West into smaller, more isolated households — extended multigenerational households persist as the norm. (Pesando, 2019) Even in the United States and Canada, these large shared households were commonplace well into the mid-twentieth century, with the shift to nuclear families only happening between 1940 and 1980, a blink in the long history of humanity. (Pilkauskas et al., 2020)

This story of shared living is much older still: for two million years, we humans lived in villages, small circles of 30 to 150, guided by what anthropologists call cooperative bonds and mutual aid. Here, the forces shaping human life were stillness (long, unhurried hours in the presence of familiar faces) and compassion (room made for each person, hearts open).

My mother grew up in the rhythm of her own family village, with members coming and going unannounced, evenings spent at the dinner table without agenda, security coming from the certainty she belonged to her people, until…

Grief for a Lost World

At thirty, she left it all behind, bringing her husband and her young son (me, on my third birthday) to Canada. She was certain a better future awaited us there.

Psychiatrists Dinesh Bhugra and Matthew Becker (2005) gave a name to what came next: cultural bereavement, the grief for a lost world of belonging. It’s more than a single event. It’s a chronic condition stemming from leaving behind a world of deep connection and entering one of self-reliance: no one stops by anymore to enjoy an evening of easy, laid-back togetherness; it becomes busyness, scheduling, and even needing an appointment to see a friend; the winters are colder and the distances greater.

My mother seldom spoke about what she lost, caught up in building a life and raising me, her son. Then, in a hospital room five decades later, her nearly forgotten village reappeared beside her, and for a few days she basked in the remembered, easy rhythm of people who belonged to each other.

When they were discharged, my mother wept for a loss she’d long carried, hidden in her heart, now brought to the surface: the family beside her had held up a mirror to everything she’d gone without for fifty-five years.

As I sit beside her now, holding her hand, I tell her she is going home to the original village…

The Largest Village There Is

I tell my mother that death isn’t the final separation she fears but exactly its opposite, the final return. It’s the raindrop falling back into the ocean, the homecoming to the largest village there is: the wholeness we are all born out of, the one we can never truly leave. And without intending to, I’m doing what psychologists share helps most, creating a felt sense that death isn’t annihilation but a natural passage back to the place from which we came. (Wong and Tomer, 2011)

That’s when I remember something else that helps, and it changes the way I understand everything I’ve done in my life. What also steadies my dying mother is her awareness that her love will go on, rippling outward, carried forward in me in countless ways, including one way I never recognized until just this moment.

My mother loved her family village, and ached for it, even if she seldom spoke about it… and she passed both this love and ache down to me. How? We know from intergenerational trauma research that parents with unresolved grief transmit this to their children in a handful of unspoken ways, and we now know that parents transmit their positive childhood experiences as well. (Isobel et al., 2019; Narayan et al., 2021) I’m the recipient of both the joy my mother felt for her village and her grief for its loss.

There’s more. When I came to Canada on my third birthday, too young to remember the building where I lived or being handed from one set of arms to another, my earliest recollections nonetheless traveled with me… because the research is absolute: our lives as infants and toddlers, all the places and people and experiences we don’t consciously remember, are encoded as emotional and relational patterns and stored in our long-term memory (where they shape our responses even today). (Alberini and Travaglia, 2017) The village I don’t remember is alive inside me, not just through my mother’s unspoken transmission, but also as an encoded, living, felt template.

I sit beside my mother now, her hand still in mine, and tell her again that she’s returning home to a welcoming village. She looks back at me, her son who writes about villages, and I hope she understands: her village was never lost. It traveled through her, into me, and out into the world through my work.

I realize it now. The truth I’ve been trying to share with you all along is her gift to you as much as it’s mine… maybe even more so. Here it is, for you, from the both of us this time around:

Please remember what you’re built for: belonging, mutuality, and the promise that “I will take care of you and you will take care of me.” It’s not something that can ever be taken away, even if it can be buried under consumer culture’s busyness and hidden away by its isolation.

And now, more than ever, it’s time we come home to who we really are and who we were always meant to be: people who belong to each other.

My mother will return home now, to the original village. Let’s not wait a moment longer to build ours.