“TAKE ME HOME”

How many times during the length of a marriage does one of the partners nudge the other whispering, “Let’s go home.”  It doesn’t matter how great the party, how good the movie, how grand the evening or even how perfect the vacation, there comes a point when it’s time to go home.  Children aren’t much different either; from a skinned knee on the playground to puppy love’s first rejection, the yearning is the same, “I wanna go home.”  The youthful statement is often accompanied by sobs, pleadings when bored or whining when the pleadings aren’t heard.  Poets write verse about home, lyricists link home to a melody, our service people long for it and commuters drive for hours to get there.  Back home is where mom and dad live, a new home is what everyone wants, and home is where we are when the door closes.  A sanctuary from the world, our private abode; a place to hang our hats, kick off our shoes and relax in front of a warm fire and hopefully, a place where love is.

But what happens when you are home and you don’t remember it being your home?   Then the lament changes to, “When are you going to take me home?”  Each day, during a certain mood, Ken tells me that he wants to go home, becoming very anxious about getting there.  No matter how often I try to reassure him, “This is your home, Ken,” he becomes less and less likely to recognize what was once so familiar.   “Look around and you might remember the family room you built many years ago, and come into the living room,” I suggest, guiding him along the way.  “See your father’s Marine photo on the wall, and your parents’ wedding picture, and right here is the family portrait, the four of you:  your mom and dad and your sister, Loretta.  And look at you at 15, aren’t you handsome?”   Up until yesterday, the tour seemed to bring him back into, at least, some reality of being at home.  However, yesterday he looked at his parents’ photos, glared at me and asked in an accusing manner, “Who gave you permission to hang my family pictures on this wall?”  At that point, fearing he would rip them down, I changed the subject and eased him into another room.  Forgetting the photographs, he still wanted me to take him home.

A few years ago, we attended the funeral of a good friend whose brain had been ravaged by Alzheimer’s very rapidly.  For their privacy, I’ll call them Luke and Paula.  Luke was a successful orthodontist at the peak of his career, being struck down at a comparatively young age.  Following diagnosis, he immediately sold his practice, and the couple moved mid-state to be near their son and his family.   While Paula battled Luke’s disease, I battled Ken’s so we didn’t keep in touch.  Seeing her again,  I gave her a hug and despite her brave front, there were tears when she said, “He’s home, he’s finally home,” explaining how often he pleaded for her to take him home.   Her reference, of course, was the Heavenly home from whence we all came.   However, I couldn’t help but wonder if he missed their place here, in the Bay Area, having been in their new home for such a short time it made sense that the old house had more memory.

I also believed Ken wouldn’t go through the “wanting to go home” phase because we have lived in this same house for more than a half century.  I was wrong.  As he regresses, he becomes younger and younger, often asking if I have seen his mother.  When he does, I know he has become the personality I have named “Buddy,” his parents’ nick name for him.  Undoubtedly, I thought, the home he  has in mind is where he grew up in Berkeley, or is it?  Even as his father, Nicholas, decended deep into Alzheimer’s he would beg to go home.  Is it possible that Ken isn’t asking to return to his childhood home on 10th Street after all?  Perhaps Paula is right.  In their tormented minds, were — are — they calling out to Him to take them home?    Could their spirit be remembering what Wordsworth suggested?

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home.”