This Is What Mourning a Place Looks Like

I recently returned to France from a visit “home” to upstate New York, where my husband and I were born and raised. We spent time visiting with family and friends, and (like we do each year) immersing our kids in American culture, as it is their singular touchpoint of heritage amidst our mostly French life.

A letter to the small town I once knew:

You are just as beautiful as I remember you: lush with rolling hills and majestic waterfalls. You still have your tall maples and oaks that will turn crimson and golden in autumn. I know your village streets and can find my way through town.

I remember you, but I do not recognize you. 

There is a familiarity that remains, even against the strangeness. It is the dissonance that teaches me what grief feels like. 

Grief has a way of both stretching and sustaining gratitude. I have deep gratitude for the foundation you helped me build—my education, friendships and traditions. But I am stretched by the rift between who you were and who you have become. 

Your county fair was as festive as ever. I stuffed myself with maple candies and funnel cake, watched my children become wide-eyed with awe at the demolition derby, and met the prize-winning market pig. But I couldn’t help but wonder if I belonged. I lacked a red baseball cap (the kind that announces allegiance in today’s America), and I will never wear one. 

Your stores have grown immensely. There are more choices than I remember. Choices are what capitalism is all about, aren’t they? Students poured through the big sliding glass doors. You have been fortunate to host a university that draws people from far and wide to study.

Multiple languages surrounded me, a reminder that the world arrives in August to do their school shopping, just like me. But I wondered if ICE was there too, watching and waiting for someone to make a wrong move. 

Your main street still wears its charm with its iron lampposts adorned with banners honoring our local veterans. If I paused long enough, I was sure I could breathe in the scent of fresh diner coffee and pancakes.

But in the pause, I noticed the billboards, “Guns and Gold for Cash,” and the one that told me we were supposed to “Take America Back.” The other held fragile hope in “Narcan Available Here.” Your welcome was warm, but the undercurrent was chilling. 

Maybe it’s not you; it’s me. I have been without you for over a decade, and we have both changed. 

I left you, moving to become a stranger in the faraway land of France. In leaving you behind, I discovered new ways of life: 

I have come to understand the power of a greeting in every conversation. “Bonjour, Madame.” Eyes meet, and in that briefest of moments, dignity is exchanged. For we are all human and deserve to be seen.

I have learned to sit at the table for meals that melt from lunch into dinner, with each course drawing us closer together. The bread is broken slowly; the wine is poured generously. In this ritual, we practice community. 

I find comfort in the market that spills out onto the streets from the town’s center. We all gather for the same purpose—to find in the rainbow of fresh produce our nourishment for the week. For we all must be sustained. 

I am encouraged by the way healthcare is spoken of as a right,  not a privilege. For we should not be undone financially by illness. It is not charity to be cared for in sickness, but an acknowledgement of our shared humanity.

I see hope in the protests that close the streets and delay my train. The collective voice of the people is still powerful and can produce change. Here, protest is a kind of heritage, and a reminder that conviction is stronger than convenience. 

In discovering these new ways of life, we have built another kind of home. But every gain of belonging in a new place has widened my distance from you.

I want to believe I still belong to you; my blue passport says it is so. Though I am stitched into your fabric, the thread has thinned.

The place I once knew has become a tapestry of distant memories. This is what mourning a place feels like. In one hand, I hold love; in the other, estrangement. I recognize the maples and the lampposts and still wonder if I am a stranger to you now. 

Perhaps it is in this grief and wondering that we can find our way forward together: “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do them wrong. The stranger that sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love them as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 19:33-34).

If I am a stranger to you now, let me be one that you welcome. And may we both welcome the weary, the hopeful, the oppressed, the poor, the refugee and those longing to belong. In this love, we will find our way forward and find ourselves again. 

The measure of our future will never be in our baseball caps or billboards, but in the wideness of our embrace. To welcome the stranger is to remember who and whose we are. This is how we will shape who we will become. 

May it be so, for both of us.