Landing in Mississippi on that Delta Airlines flight, on such a grey, leaveless morning, felt more like the entrance to a tomb, than the entrance to what my life would turn out to be many years later.
For those of us who have been exiled from any country, as opposed to those of us who have immigrated from other countries, adjustment to a new life is sometimes unbearably painful.
The exile has been uprooted from his or her country.
The immigrant has chosen to leave his or her country and has the freedom to return to it, at any time.
The exiled person does not have the freedom to return to his or her native country … for some, the longing for it never goes away.
It was during that period of adjustment to a new life in my mother’s birth land, that I read Erich Maria Remarque’s, One Night in Lisbon. I don’t know that I fully understood the novel then, nor do I know how I would understand it differently today. Although, the underlying theme, and Remarque‘s written words, “memory is like a cancer,” stayed within me for a long time.
Yes. And memory is like a cancer which stops the forward step of those of us holding on to ungrieved losses, like for the Diaz-Balart brothers and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and for the many Cuban Americans like them, who want to hold on to, and bring back, a Cuba which has long been gone.
Nevertheless, for myself, having grieved the loss of Cuba, this new possibility of visiting the bay where I was born so many years ago, the very bay which nurtured my youth and gave rise to poems, and to my first understanding of nature and of the human heart, makes this heart beat fast.
The very bay where I want my ashes to be taken when I die.
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