Going Home

First, a caveat: the title here is not, so far as I know, a clever metaphor of any kind suggesting anything about my premature demise. Period. I do like metaphors and write with them a great deal--maybe too much. But this one is as literal as it gets. I'm going home. Tomorrow. After almost five interminable weeks. Five weeks of physical therapy and occupational therapy and 5:30 AM vital-signs checks and enduring the food and my family trekking yet once more for a visit and roommates who can't sleep without the TV on and nurses who make me laugh and doctors who show up when they want and 80-year-old patients who stare off in the distance as they tell you about a time when they were young. And that's not even a fraction of what these five weeks have been.

Five weeks, and tomorrow I'm going home.

Home. What a lovely-sounding word. Cliches abound around that word, like a ball made out of rubber bands or a maypole wrapped up in ribbons in the spring. But sometimes cliches are apt because the word is too slippery and somehow cliches give it traction. Home. It's a whispy word that floats around; it's a warm word that glows a little when you say it just right; it's a word that brings to mind waiting and invitation and welcoming all at once. We wait to go home, or home waits for us. We invite someone home, or we are invited to someone else's. We welcome someone home, or home welcomes us.

But as so many others have already said, home is not so much a physical space. Four walls can't wait or invite or welcome. No, it's the people in it that count. It's the sense of place and belonging and rest. The chance to be just you--no pretending, no airs, no sense, really, of yourself at all. At least that's the way it should be.

No wonder going home is a metaphor for heaven.

Metaphors aside, tomorrow I get to see this hospitally place in the rear view mirror, and it will be nice to see it shrink like that. But it's what lies ahead facing forward that excites me, that marvelous and lovely thing coming into view called home.