The most important “w” is something we tend to lose when away from home too long. It is also something we lose over time. Sometimes you don’t even know why you are miserable.

Featured image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

There are those among us who live to travel. They get a gleam in their eye packing and thinking of some place new. Sometimes they travel for weeks or months on end, but, for the most part, they always come home.

For most of us, there is something incredibly special about home. Even when we move away and create lives in another location, it is a very long time before that “home” replaces home. In large part, I think several of the annual holidays, while formed around some religious themes, were actually created more due to our need to come home and for those there to have us come home. When we are in our youth and away it is more because those there need us to return, some time after we cross 40 it is more because we need to go home and remember.

The Most Important “w”

Even when you don’t have kids of your own, you can become so caught up in the what and the where that you lose track of the most important “w” of them all, who. When you start to realize you don’t know who you are anymore, it is a comfort to go home and find yourself again. At times I wonder just how bad off our country is going to be given so many families have lost their homes. Their kids won’t have a place to come home to later in life. Oh, I’m sure their parents will find a dwelling of some kind, but it might not have that feeling of home.

Oddly enough, this essay isn’t about the economy or politics or even IT. This little soul bearing has to do with my grandmother. She’s about to turn 95 and has the advanced dementia. When Alzheimer’s has taken root along with the body starting to shut down they call it advanced dementia. For her it has been a slow and horrible exit.

Advanced Dementia – Loss of Home

Some times she remembers me, but I don’t expect it anymore. When she does come around into quasi-lucid conversation she cries about wanting nothing other than to go home. She doesn’t have a home anymore. Even if she did, she has to have the full-time medical care that could only be provided by a facility much like the one she is in. She is in the best to be found around here. We know this because she has been in other places before.

Still, there is a twisting of the knife when you hear that. It is conditioned into us from childhood. From those first times we were separated from home and no matter how great the place was we were at, we only wanted to be home. With Grandparent’s Day around the corner it’s an extra turn of the rusty blade.

With every person and place you forget comes the inevitable loss of home. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, you lose all sense of home. You don’t even know how cruel it is that you can’t remember the kids whose diapers you changed. They are simply forced to watch the most important “w” slip away.

There has been a lot of chatter from politicians about “euthanasia panels” for a government run health plan. They use it as a scare tactic to try and defeat any kind of change in the medical industry. I can tell you right now that I would be the first to sign my name up and say, before I get like this, let me sleep the coming sleep.