What I Remembered Before the Move: My Grandmother, and the Feeling of Having a Place to Return To

Relocation: Choices and Reflections — Part 6

---

Something That Came Back to Me

While getting ready for the move, a memory surfaced unexpectedly.

A place from childhood. Somewhere I went almost every day without thinking about it — somewhere I felt, without quite knowing the word for it, safe.

---

The Place I Always Went

My grandmother was there.

She had helped raise me alongside my mother, and after school I would go to her house nearly every day. Nothing special ever happened. She’d give me a little pocket money. I’d walk to the corner shop or the small candy store nearby and pick out something sweet. Then I’d come back and sit with her at the low table with the heater underneath, eating snacks, letting time pass.

I was simply there. It was simply what we did.

---

The Move That Changed Everything

Then one day, my father was transferred for work. We moved far away.

The ordinary life I’d known ended abruptly, on an ordinary day.

I don’t think I understood what was happening, not really. There was no time to feel the loss — I was too busy trying to adapt. The dialect was different. I thought I was speaking the same language as everyone else, but people told me the way I talked was strange. I learned to imitate the local accent so I wouldn’t stand out.

I’d never struggled academically before, but suddenly I couldn’t follow even simple arithmetic. Looking back, that probably says something about how disorienting the whole change was.

Still, every day, I missed her. I wanted to see my grandmother. I felt lost and small.

---

Four Months Later

That summer, four months after the move, my grandmother died.

I still don’t entirely know how to hold that.

But there’s one thought that has stayed with me all these years.

---

Loneliness

As a child, I came to believe that loneliness had something to do with her death.

I have no way of knowing if that’s true. But as a child, that’s the only way it made sense to me.

Phone calls were expensive back then. We couldn’t talk for long. Both my mother and my grandmother would tell me to hang up quickly, and after a while it started to feel like calling at all was somehow wrong, something I shouldn’t do.

And then, before anything could be said or repaired, she was gone. It happened so fast there was barely time to grieve.

---

People and Places Can’t Be Separated

This memory has never really left me.

People are bound to places. And places exist inside us as memory, inseparable from the people who inhabited them. That’s why changing where you live is never just a practical matter. It’s never just movement.

---

How This Connects to Moving Now

This time, I chose to move. No one is taking me away. There’s no transfer, no sudden uprooting.

And yet — something about the act of leaving a place, of changing where I belong, connects back to that old memory in a way I can’t fully explain.

---

Where the Feeling Comes From

Looking back, I think that time with my grandmother was where my sense of a safe place first came from.

Someone was there. I could simply exist alongside them. Nothing needed to be explained or adjusted or improved. I was allowed to be exactly as I was.

She never corrected me. She never asked me to be different. She was just there.

She was, technically, not a blood relative — she was connected to my mother through her father’s side of the family. She never had children of her own, but she took in my mother during a formative and difficult time, becoming the person who raised her.

What I meant to her — what I represented to a woman who had made family out of people who weren’t born into it — I’ll never really know.

But the texture of those hours is still with me. Her hands, bent from rheumatism. The way she’d work open a snack wrapper with those same hands and pass it to me. The pocket money pressed into my palm. The particular pitch and rhythm of her voice when she called my name.

I remember all of it.

---

The Years I Kept the Lid Closed

For a long time, I kept this memory sealed away.

Whenever it surfaced, warmth and grief arrived together, and the grief was the kind that has nowhere to go. I think I looked away from it in order to keep moving forward, to get on with things.

But the thought still comes sometimes. If she had lived.

---

The People Who Connect Us to the Past

My mother has an aunt — just two years older than her — who has always reminded me, in some quiet way, of my grandmother. She is now around the same age my grandmother was when she died.

Sometimes, without warning, the fear of losing someone again moves through me.

I’ve long believed that people can grow frail from loneliness — that something essential weakens when connection is absent for too long. I once came across the idea that infants who receive adequate nutrition but little touch, little voice, little human warmth, can fail to thrive. I don’t know how precisely that holds up. But as a child, it felt like an explanation for what had happened to my grandmother. As though her death and that idea were the same thing, seen from different angles.

We live through our connections with others.

That’s part of why I want to be near my mother. I’m afraid that if she spends too long alone, something in her might begin to fade — the way I’ve always imagined something faded in my grandmother.

---

The Child I Was, and the Person I Am Now

When my grandmother died, I was a child. I couldn’t do anything. I wanted to see her, but the distance and the time were entirely beyond my control.

It’s different now.

I’m 45. I’m an adult who gets to make choices — where to live, whose life to be present in. Those decisions belong to me.

Which is exactly why I don’t want to carry regret into whatever comes next. When the day comes that my parents are no longer here, I don’t want to be someone who did nothing when doing something was still possible. I’ve already lived through that once. I don’t want to repeat it.

---

Closing

We live through our connections with others. When those connections break, something can go quiet in us — or worse.

That’s why I still want to be near my mother. Not out of obligation, but out of something older and harder to name.

I used to think of this move as a choice about the future. But maybe it’s also a response to the past — a way of finally being able to do what I couldn’t do as a child.

The place I think of when I imagine somewhere to return to — it lives in those afternoons. In that house. In her.

This memory, surfacing now, will shape what I’m looking for as I decide where to go next. I’m certain of that.

---

▶ Read the complete collection of essays in English

---

This essay is also available in Japanese and Spanish.

日本語版はこちら

Versión en español:

---

If this essay resonated with you,
you can support my writing here ☕