The Lost Neighborhood

I sometimes think of the past as a neighborhood to which I long to return. The basketball playground where I defended well but shot poorly, the corner grocery store owned by the family whose daughter I dated in high school, the parish church as imposing as some cathedrals — the memories all pull my thoughts into the past. 

More than memories, I’m tempted to imagine reliving that life. Why? Because my past becomes more understandable with time. Now, I see how my years there could have been lived better. When I give in to the temptation, it’s as if loss and the passage of time blend together. The past — what’s lost — seems strangely both dreamlike and lifelike. 

Recently, I’ve been learning to speak Mandarin. My Taiwanese teacher tells me that time in Chinese culture, unlike the West, is not thought of as linear: Rather than a succession of discrete moments, she explains, time is more like a river. Upstream, downstream, and the water in front of us are not separate. 

I find that difficult to understand. But once I thought I experienced it. 

Late one Friday evening I returned home for the weekend from college without my house keys. I walked a few blocks to my aunt’s home where I spent the night, a three-bedroom, two-story house in which my grandparents raised my mother and her nine siblings.

Lying in bed, I thought of my mom’s family of 12, bundled into this small house. Family stories flowed through my mind: Raucous parties and rolled-up carpets, tales of two uncles who passed away long before my birth, visits from Irish cousins who’d crossed the Atlantic. How did my mom, her parents, five sisters, and four brothers live in such crowded quarters? Which aunts and uncles had slept in the very bed that was mine that night? I felt that time in my mother’s childhood home was flowing. I had joined the generations in the river.

Although loss inevitably pulls me into the past, I try to see it less as a temptation and more as a doorway. There’s a moment of devastating loss near the end of the gospel of Luke that comes to mind.

In the final chapter, two disciples walking the road to Emmaus after the Crucifixion are reflecting on what they’ve lost. They meet a man they do not recognize who asks what they’re discussing. They share the news — Jesus, the prophet and charismatic leader to whom they’ve devoted their past three years, is dead. They confess that they hoped he was the one who would set their people free. That hope is now a thing of the past, replaced by overwhelming grief. Yet, moments later, they tell the stranger something that points to the future: “Some women of our group have just brought us some astonishing news”: The one who was dead may be alive. The apostles, whether they understood or not, were standing in a doorway where their past, not gone at all, was flowing into their future.

Joseph Wakelee-Lynch is editor of LMU Magazine.