Funny thing, going home. For a long-ago immigrant, where is home, anyway? Back to Oxford, where I first met and fell in love with Britain – and the man who became my husband. Chance encounters – this time walking into a photo being taken by a couple from Washington DC. We two had been talking about how very priivileged Oxford students are. Did they know it? Had we? Then the  interrupted man remarked about how “exclusive” the US college in DC was, that I had attended, and how beautiful the campus was. Another jolt: was it? Had I known that then? Or simply taken it for granted, as perfectly normal and as expected, certainly nothing special to me then, hemmed in as it was by streets full of crowded multi-occupancy housing.

And yet we thought we were thinking radically then, questioning everything around us.And maybe it is only during those college-age years, when we really start to become who we want to be? Home, as in family – and place – of-origin form us unthinkingly, clothing us with sets of assumptions and expectations, which then seem to take a lifetime to unpick, examine and decide whether to keep or trash.

And then something happens, to re-start that process, after thinking it was all over and done with, it starts again, ferociously, insistently and can’t be ignored.  Deaths of parents, of course, and now the death of a much younger brother.  Coming to terms with losing him, just as I was getting to know him better.  The shock and horror of dying, being there and then so suddenly not there.  And even though it was sort of expected, the speed and inexorability of the last weeks, collapsing into days. Finally getting into the rhythm of the hospice day, visiting and returning, becoming familiar and then, in a minute, gone.   Prayers said, belongings gathered; the room cleared, ready for the next patient.

Straight into funeral arrangements:  in Connecticut funerals usually take place within 3 days of the death, so no time to lose.  We work long days and manage to get everything done, just in time.  A Monday morning funeral : then nothing.  It’s all over;  too quickly perhaps? We are exhausted and wrung out but not “done”. Too much to take in so quickly. We have done our best for our brother.  And we have all dispersed, thankfully able to get back into our own lives again.

But still.  Not really ready to be the same, to do the same things.  Forced to confront how little time is left, for me especially, as the oldest, well out in the front of the queue now.  How to use every minute of the time that is left? How to pick up some of the dropped threads of ambition spun in those college years? The contributions not yet made.  The need to live more fully, eyes and ears more open to everything and everyone around me.

Trinity College, with its ethos of giving back. A lifetime of “public service” working for the NHS doesn’t feel like enough now. Another birthday days away, no time to lose.