Every time I come back to Portugal I catch up on who has married/had children/divorced/died since I left. At this point the list of survivors is smaller than the list of those on the other side.
This is, of course, true of everyone. We are born to a world of adults and as we age, they age also, and die. The problem is the distance and the fact I only come back every few years.
It is a problem because the minute I get on the plane I forget all the changes. Look, it makes perfect sense. After all my mind is used to the village as it was, a place where it spent close to twenty five years. It’s much easier to return there than to the little snatches it gets for one to two weeks every few years. So every time I come back I find myself, at the back of my mind expecting to see my grandmother and to visit the places of my childhood. My grandmother is of course long dead and those places covered in cement.
What I get are slices of life that amount to one of those mainstream novels where you see people age, and the family line die out.
Sometimes I wonder if my grandmother’s best friends, who lived across the street most of my childhood and kept one of two general stores in the village, would be heartbroken to find their family line has died out without descendants, leaving their sprawling house and old garden empty and shuttered the moss-covered walls covered with “for sale” signs. Would they still have engaged as vigorously in the life of the village, sold peanuts and candy to the village children and helped build the giant bonfire every summer Solestice? Would they have worked quite so hard? Would they be sad to see their home closed and falling to ruin?
Is it a mercy they don’t know, or could they have changed their life course if they did?
These stories happen around us all the time, I know. It only affects me more because of distance, of seeing it suddenly again, and of that childhood that no one who is part of my day to day life remembers and of which these people were such an integral part. It is a question as old as time. If we could look into the future, what would we change today? And would it be good or bad?
Stories have been written about this, and I can’t add to them, or change them. I can only feel a vague melancholy about this being human thing and all its limitations.
According To Hoyt 