Tied up in my job is my housing, my healthcare, my retirement plans, and my actual career. Leaving my job would mean not being allowed back in. I had worked toward this job since 2014, when I figured out it was my dream job, and I achieved it in 2018. So when I tell you I wanted to walk away from my job, I’m telling you a major part of me wanted to destroy what I had built for myself, irrevocably.
Moving to the town she called home would mean living somewhere I already know I would never feel I “belonged.” I would never find a job using my degrees or my talents. I would give up disposable income, international opportunities, career satisfaction, and being surrounded by people who more or less see the world in a way that jives with how I do.
And yet, knowing this, I still wanted it — desperately. I wanted to run away from everything that had been true before her death and steep myself in the scraps of her presence where she last lived. I wanted to get to know the people she had loved in the community she built around herself. And I suspect part of me wanted to atone for having chosen to roam so far from home by chaining myself as close to where she stood as I could.
It has now been about two months since she died. I have not yet blown up my life, and the desire mostly receded. What has remained, though, is a new sense of being unsettled in my choices. I am staying the course I had charted for myself, for now. But I now have a voice in the back of my mind reminding me of the true cost of the distance and my decisions. That voice whispers to me not to feel too secure in the 5-, 10-, and 20-year horizon line. It tells me I didn’t even realize before that I felt safe to stray across the globe because my sister was an anchor that could tie me to home.
I don’t know where home is anymore. Ten years ago, I stopped living in the place I called home my entire life. Home is a complicated concept, made more difficult by the fact that my parents — the only remaining relatives with whom I have a relationship — now are rethinking their own next chapter. The state that is woven in my DNA might suddenly be only part of our pasts. The home we grew up in will be sold. The streets we drove, the buildings we walked, the places we ate will all just be distant memories. I haven’t entirely lost that home, not yet, but I feel like I am already mourning its disappearance, too.
And it’s only now, as I sit here and write, that I consider I didn’t have to make the conscious choice to blow up my life, because my sister’s death already set off a chain reaction that I can’t control. It’s already happening. I’m just sheltering in place until I can assess what is left in the aftermath.
Unmoored Sister 