Family tragedies drew me back to Media, Pa., my hometown, for two months.
My time out was an education in areas ranging from depression, suicide, and grieving to hospital care, probate and freeway driving.
Little of it was fun and most of it was like flossing, a necessary bother.
A sizable part of my time was spent navigating family politics, considering what to say to whom, when and why and how. It’s not something I’m particularly good at because I haven’t had much practice. Like many of us in Haines and in Alaska, I’m a transplant. My family is far away and I only occasionally have to make decisions with them or concerning them.
The life of a person who leaves home can be an easy one. Most people in the world don’t move away. They stay in the area they were born. They are bound to the that place, and to the history of their lives and to the people they have known – and who have known them – their entire lives.
We migrants are the exceptions. We get to live more freely, relatively unencumbered by the people we belong to or the persons we once were.
Another migrant’s benefit is that in the minds of our families and friends back home, we are great adventurers, conquering distant lands. Unwittingly we capitalize on a meme steeped in Americana and the American West: Hardy pioneers hacking a home out of the wilderness. Add in the aura and mystique of Alaska and the infrequency of trips to our hometowns, and we become legends, deserving of a hero’s welcome on our rare visits.
I saw this the first time in Australia, joining my wife on one of her infrequent trips to home soil. Her family broke out giant prawns and fine champagne. They planned special outings or visits to other family members or old friends. They showered her with small favors. How funny, I thought, until I realized I was often received the same way.
How unfair it is that we who live far away and share so little of the burden for caring for our families also get royal treatment on the occasions that we gift them with the pleasure of our company.
It’s not this way in all the world. A friend who spent two Peace Corps years in an impoverished African village recounted the pity villagers showed her when she explained the distance that separated her from her family. These people living in filth and poverty with lifespans averaging about 40 years wept for her and at the thought of being so distant from kin.
Their habitual greeting, on meeting others, was to ask: “How is your mother? How is your father? How is your brother? How is your sister? How is your aunt? How is your uncle?,” etc. until every member in that person’s family was checked on. My friend found the greeting as maddeningly time-consuming as it was endearing, but the lesson was real.
Blood is thicker than water. We are joined at the hip to our families. Not unlike Siamese twins, we cannot separate ourselves from them. We can try, but usually at our peril.
It is not unusual for we Alaskans to be estranged from our Lower 48 families, or at odds with them. Sometimes painful family narratives are part of the reason we left home and moved to a far, forbidding land.
Many of us are prodigal sons or daughters, stray sheep or black sheep, misfits who came looking for a place to fit in.
But where people ultimately fit is with the families they belong to, where living day to day means doing the hard work of getting along with those they sometimes or often disagree with, either working things out or living on the sharp edge of differences tempered by love.
Those are difficult places. Amid families, we swallow our pride. We hold our tongues. In the name of love, we do things we otherwise wouldn’t. Family relationships often require difficult emotional work.
We “hardy Alaskans” often find or take a way out of those obligations. That makes ours an easier lot.