Writer Ella Winter once remarked to Thomas Wolfe, “Don’t you know you can’t go home again?” When I was growing up, many years after Wolfe had died, there was still outrage and hatred in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina about what they had read, or seen about their town, in his books.

Maybe because my mother was from Asheville, and we lived close by, that the words, “You can’t go home again,” have been haunting me this past year. Perhaps it is because several of my high school classmates contacted me for one motive or another…a class reunion, looking for a lost friend, whatever the reason…it doesn’t matter.

There are things I would like to say to them, but I won’t. I really don’t know them…not anymore, and they don’t know me. So this morning I write, perhaps with the hope that someone will read, and understand, why I don’t return to visit them and the mountains of North Carolina.

I was an only child and the youngest member of my class. My mother actually changed my birth year so I could be with other kids. Ours was a small town, and like now, I lived and played in the woods. Early on, I had no neighbors. My closest friend lived at the top of a rather steep hill.

Like my grandmother, I just knew things. I didn’t know how I knew what I knew…but I knew. And my mother brought me up to know that it is ok to “just know.” You don’t have to know how, or why.

The earliest fear I can remember was that Daddy would die and leave me. It seems that I thought about this possibility frequently.

In a way, the death of my father during my freshman year of college came as no surprise, even though he was only 56 and “relatively” healthy, or so we thought. I awoke at 12:23 AM and his presence was in my room. I got up, packed for a funeral, sat down on the bed and waited for the telephone to ring.

“Your father is very ill and has been taken to the emergency room. We’re sending someone to get you.”

“He’s dead,” I said, his presence strongly beside me.

“Don’t say that. He’s very ill.”

It was April 14, the Monday after Easter. I still remember the brightness of the sun coming through the windows of my home when I walked in the front door. Mother, in her late 40′s had been sedated. I was now the one in charge and I would have to make the funeral arrangements. Me, barely a teenager, having never gone to a funeral…they had to be kidding.

They weren’t.

Questions of where to bury him…North Carolina or the family plot in Georgia, casket, service, music…what was our financial situation?

But as soon as I had the thought, his presence would give me the answer.

(I didn’t always accept what he said. We argued over the music for his service because first, I was a music major, and second (more importantly) I didn’t want to hear his favorite music the rest of my life and think of his funeral.

Daddy stayed beside me and comforted me for the next three days. He would whisper things such as, “Everything, everybody dies. One day you will die, too. There is nothing to be afraid of.”

I could tell you that the wife of the funeral director yelled and screamed at me because I would not go see my father in the casket. She said it would make my mother “feel better.” In fact, when I walked into the church and saw the casket open (it was supposed to be closed) I walked out.

The night of the funeral, Daddy asked me to come sit at the top of the stairs. There we had our last, long conversation. “You and your mother are going to be fine, and it is time for me to go on. There is an insurance policy I want you to call about that will take care of you and your mother.”

Then I felt him pull away.

To this day, as I ponder the question of death, life after death, or consciousness I regret not asking, “Where are you going? How can you leave us now?”

But I didn’t.

In reality, my mother was buried along with Daddy. Oh, she lived a few more years, made some bad choices, but who wouldn’t have in her circumstances? After all, she was 17 when she married and the life she was accustomed to had dissolved in under a year.

When I left my hometown for the last time, having sold my family home, I left everything. Someone else had cleared out yearbooks, family photos, all the things that might help me remember and put names with faces.

The other day, while working with Michaela, a physical therapist who is really an incredible healer from another planet, I wondered out loud why I had feelings I couldn’t describe when someone from my home town reached out to me.

“Something must have happened there that you don’t want to repeat,” she said.

As I struggled to think of what it could be, she added…”When did your father die?”

“April 14.”

My body awareness shifted, and I gained insight as to why I can’t go home again.

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