What could be worse than leaving?

Remember when I said that the people who make me truly me where gathering in the place that makes me truly me? Well, those people, the ones I love most, are leaving and it’s awful.

For four years I was a Leaver. Every year I would return home in June, like a confused migratory bird moving from the finally-warming North American continent to the cooling-for-winter African one (fortunately much easier to stomach than its Northern counterparts) and every August I would pack up, cry on and off for the last week, drive to the airport with my family, have a tearful farewell that included the Bell family traditional send off where you wave to the Leaver as they go through customs and security every minute or so when they look back with raised arm until they step around the last corner you can see in the distance. Then I would sit at the boarding gate, maybe journal about leaving home and Zimbabwe, board my flight, cry a bit as I watched the Zimbabwean landscape disappear below me, turn on my in-flight entertainment and order a drink. In the following weeks (and months!), I would be homesick, call home frequently, write when I could, enjoy every phone call but feel sometimes feel even worse after them when I couldn’t be there for the sounds of home I could hear in the background or when the conversation could only go so far because they didn’t really know the world I was in. Leaving was painful. The most painful thing I’d experienced in my privileged life. And then, last year, for the first time, I was left.

I watched as siblings--including a youngest brother off to college for the first time--packed and prepared, as they got sad but also excited. I watched and remembered my own times of leaving and saying goodbye to places and people. And on the final day, we all drove to the airport and this time I stood on the other side of the barrier. I watched as the leavers walked away and turned for the traditional farewell, arm raised, again and again, until they stepped around that last corner and were gone. And we got into the car and drove home. And there was no in-flight entertainment to distract, no fancy drink to sip, no exciting new place to move into, no strange new people to meet. There was just home. And us. And a space where there should have been another person, with nothing to distract from the normality and routine that hurt because of that space.

Leaving the place and the people you love is hard and painful. But there is something worse.