With everything that’s happened, we’ve been thinking seriously about going back to Britain — this will surprise no one, I’m sure, and it’s a natural enough gut reaction to all that’s going on. Let’s just go home, where we understand how things work and how to get around. Let’s just go home where we have contacts and friends to help us (never mind that’s one of the exact reasons we came over to the US). We’re getting to the point where neither of us knows where we really ought to be.
There is a point in this post by A Brit Different where she says that she can’t imagine dying and being buried in the US instead of her native Scotland because it feels so foreign, and that really struck a chord with me. M and I had a similar conversation just the other night, and he told me he didn’t want to die here — he’d realised he just couldn’t imagine ending his days so far from home. We moved here with the vague idea that this would be it, this would be a permanent move. But we began to revise that idea fairly quickly (starting the morning of our flight over). That M felt that way didn’t really surprise me, because expatting is like that — you just don’t know how it’s going to work for you until you do it — but I really didn’t expect repatting to effect me in such a similar way.
I think the question of where you expect (want?) to die is a very good test for an expat: it tells you where your heart truly calls home. The whole time I lived in Britain, I always assumed I’d be back in the US when it came time to die (at a ripe old age, mind you). In the early years abroad, that was a strong and natural assumption. As time went on, the idea of dying in Britain lost a bit of its foreignness, but it still felt strange enough that I just never imagined it would ever be the case.
Now we are here in the US and I am surprised — really surprised — to discover that I find myself feeling the same way about dying in America as I did all that time about dying in Britain. The idea feels as just as strange, just as unreal — and it feels like I’ve lost my bearings a bit. I’m not sure which direction to turn. I keep looking left, and then right, and then left again… and find myself rooted to the spot because I no longer know which direction to go in.
I wonder if it’s like this for all repats? Would M feel the same if we went back to Britain? But perhaps not… it more probably affects repats who have been long-term expats. It’s such a strange and unnerving thing, to lose your bearings like this — the bearings that anchor the very foundations of your life — and such a strange thing to have the realisation come so suddenly. In a way, it’s been oddly freeing for me as well. I feel like I could move back to the UK now — if we decided to — and live my life to its end there, without having that feeling that I am in the wrong place. Neither place feels right, neither place feels wrong.
We can go anywhere. We just have to decide.
Stumble it!
Hi Strawberry,
I don’t have any advice to give but just wanted to say that this post really struck a chord with me. I’m still an expat, not a repat, but have been struggling with the same kind of issues. I agree that it is a very strange experience — frightening but, in a bizarre way, also liberating — and it’s reassuring to know that I’m not the only one having these feelings.
(I touched upon this topic in a recent post on my own blog, which is currently invite-only — if you’d like to read it, just e-mail me or send a message.)
Laura
I’m sorry you’re having to deal with all this, it’s horrible to feel unanchored to the place you are. I’m guessing that how you feel as a repat of six months might be a bit different than your feelings as a repat of several or more years. The hardest thing I think I’ll ever learn is that no matter what decision you make on any matter, you will probably have doubts and second guess yourself anyway. Just hang in there and make the decisions that seem the most right for you and your family and keep faith in that.
I certainly know where I want to, if not die, be buried. In England. In Whitby, North Yorkshire, England. Even though I’ve never lived there and only visited England a total of 18 weeks, I have always felt that it was my real home, and if I can’t manage to move there someday from here (USA), then I’ve instructed my husb. to take my ashes over to Whitby and bury me at the top of the 199 steps overlooking my favourite town in the world. Home is where the heart is, and that’s where my heart is.
Wow….this post made me cry !
This is a question I have thought about on many different occasions, and still to this day, am torn.
In my heart, I want to go back and be buried in my home town, high on the hilltop, next to my dad, and in the family grave.
The other side of me struggles with the guilt of raising a daughter here, and two grandchildren, having spent many more years in the US than UK, and living a very comfortable, and happy life.
It’s funny how our heart strings call us home, and even in a time of deciding our final resting place, we are torn between choosing….
I think the problem with expatting and repatting is that when you expat you *expect* everything to be different and weird, full of adventures and steep learning curves. Your failures are things to laugh at and tell stories from.
As a repat I think there is an expectation that everything will suddenly fall into place because it’s your homeland. Somehow it’s not as exciting and funny and adventurous to go through trials and tribulations as a *repat*. In fact, feeling alienated in your homeland (because you and it has changed during the lapsed time) is just frightening, disorienting, and a little bit embarrassing. Not exactly the stuff to tell amusing anecdotes from.
Laura and Josephine, It actually means a lot to hear that this has been an issue for you both as well. In a way it seems to silly to mention (what does it matter where you die?) and perhaps too morbid to discuss, but it seems to a theme for a lot of expats. Thanks to both of you for confirming that!
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I think the problem with expatting and repatting is that when you expat you *expect* everything to be different and weird, full of adventures and steep learning curves. Your failures are things to laugh at and tell stories from. As a repat I think there is an expectation that everything will suddenly fall into place because it’s your homeland. Somehow it’s not as exciting and funny and adventurous to go through trials and tribulations as a *repat*. In fact, feeling alienated in your homeland (because you and it has changed during the lapsed time) is just frightening, disorienting, and a little bit embarrassing
Sedders, I don’t think it could have been said more perfectly! Spot on.
Not exactly the stuff to tell amusing anecdotes from.
Hang on… I’m workin’ on it!!!!
I am in my seventies and have lived in Australia for many years, but as I age I find myself not wanting to think of my ashes being scattered under harsh blue skies. Instead I want the misty skies of North Yorkshire where I originated, rain and brisk winds instead of blazing sunshine and hot, dry winds from the inland deserts.
I don’t hate, or even dislike Australia, but the pull of home grows. I know I would find too many changes to ever want to move back there to live, but to become part of that dearly loved landscape after I die would bring me full circle.
Thank you for introducing this topic, it has helped me clarify muddled thoughts as to where I should ask to be laid to rest, and why.
I found your blog through your wonderful post on NHS and American healthcare, and I can identify with this lost feeling, this life in-between. I grew up and have spent much of my life between the U.S. and Nigeria, and still, even in my thirties, am not sure where I will “end up,” although my desire to choose and settle is becoming more accute. Salman Rushdie has some beautiful passages about this feeling of homelessness:
In his book, The Wizard of Oz, he uses the film The Wizard of Oz as a metaphor for discussing the displaced person. Dorothy “immigrates” from the monotony of Kansas “over the rainbow” into a Technicolor world, yet while in Oz searches for a way to get back to Kansas. She finally repeats, “there is no place like home; there is no place like home; there is no place like home” and is whisked back to black and white. Yet what was her home but her own imagination? As Rushdie points out, Frank Baum returns Dorothy to Oz over and over in subsequent books, so that Oz ultimately becomes the “home.” Rushdie writes: “[O]nce we have left our childhood places and started out to make up our lives. . . there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us” (The Wizard 57).
In his essay “Imaginary Homelands,” he remembers his journeys back to India:
It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge–which gives rise to profound uncertainties–that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. . . . (Imaginary Homelands 10)”
In this way, what you say about being able to go anywhere but just needing to decide—that’s it, really. That decision. I can’t face it yet.
I was born in the US, have lived in Scotland and am now back in the US.
The experience of living in Scotland during my thirties has shaped me into an internationalist. I am at ‘home’ on this planet. My background is now a blend of Scottish and US. My discomfort in being back in the US is how parochial I find attitudes are in the US.
I have visited the town where I spent the first 18 years of my life. It is no longer there. Most of the exteriors of the houses in the neighborhood have been remodeled and the open spaces have been built upon. I feel no connection to that place other than in my memory. I find that I am ‘from’ my memory, not a place and even memories change over time.
In the US there are multiple environments: forest, desert, mountain, plain and in each, urban, suburban and rural. Each has a different feel to them and create their own culture. Which one is the US? Which one were you raised in and call ‘home’?
I will die wherever I am. Where I am buried or scattered is up to those who are still alive. I won’t know the difference and that frees me from being concerned with that.
[...] ever since, rolling that quiet statement around in my mind and trying to make it balance with all the other feelings I hold. And I think I understand. Our first year here was rough — we were fighting fires almost [...]