Heimweh
It seems like anyone who has ever been far from their home has a lot to say about homesickness. People used to give me advice on how to survive the nights when the sound of an airplane flying above you made your heart ache, longing to be taken back home. They gave me lists of items to bring, from Salsa Lizano to Guayabitas to that one specific headache medicine they don’t sell anywhere else. They told me I would miss the mountains, the chirping of the birds, and the smell of café chorreado. Since we don’t have a word for homesickness in Español, they used to talk about the mal de patria — the feeling of missing one’s country, and I used to think that, if missing my country was the biggest challenge, going back to visit every 6 months could be sufficient for my heart to survive the distance.
But there was something no one talked about, something the German word for homesickness, heimweh seems to capture better than mal de patria. Heimweh speaks of the ache and grief of being far from home, something I discovered is not cured by being back to the place one once called home. While the mal de patria can be comforted with a visit home or eating a meal from your country, the heimweh that immigrants experience is far more painful, far more difficult to soothe.
No one told me that once you leave home and become an immigrant, there’s no possible way to ever go back to the home you used to know. The heimweh immigrants experience is the grief of realizing home is not what it used to be because you are not who you were before you left. Even if home looks the same and the people are the same, and the mountains are still there, home might never feel like it used to. And you find that you have to reintroduce yourself to the people who once knew you perfectly, but a few weeks are not enough for them to get to know the new you. And you realize that home might never be home again, not the way it used to be. So, you wonder whether the heimweh will ever stop. Whether the heartache and the longing for home will ever heal. Whether you will ever stop feeling homesick even when you’re home.
Perhaps homesickness is a chronic illness. It flares up in those days when you long to feel known, and it becomes more manageable when you start to create a home in the foreign landscape where you immigrated. But like an illness that cannot be cured, it never leaves your body because your body knows how home felt and knows that it is no longer the same. So you grieve for what you lost when you packed a suitcase and left home. You grieve that home is not the same home you used to know and that a short visit is not enough to make up for all the time you’ve spent in a foreign land. But as you grieve, you also learn how to live with this strange illness. You learn to find joy in this foreign land you now call home. You even learn to find joy in the memories of what home used to be and in the new memories you make with every visit, no matter how short they are. And sometimes, you will be lucky enough to experience a new sense of home when the past and the present intersect, and the people who made home what it was, get to enter into what home is now. And just like that, you learn to live with this chronic pain, and you find a new place to rest from all the heimweh, and you dare to build a new home.