Home is not always the place where you live

Where’s home? For a lot of people that is a very simple question to answer. It’s the place you live, in the place you’re from. When those two places are the same, home is easy to know.

But when you live away from what you consider home, it all gets a little more complicated.

The disconnect within yourself between where you live and what you consider home is a west of Ireland story as old as time. There are countless stories, books, songs and plays written about it. In every house, family letters, some stained with tears, describe it.

It’s the reality of your body being in Dublin or London or New York or wherever and your heart being in Mayo. The weight of that on you grows as the years go on.

People who leave and don’t come back for good have that in their heads all the time. We talk about it endlessly when we meet up in our place of exile. It’s a process of translating – within yourself as well as to others – who you are and how you think in your adopted place, and what that means for how you see yourself in relation to your sense of home. Home in that sense is not a physical place.

These considerations have been the underlying theme of this column for almost 10 years. Home Thoughts from Away is reflections on life at home from someone who has spent most of their adult life out of it. One of the pleasures and challenges of being from Mayo and living in Dublin is translating each side to the other.

The sad news last week of the passing of the poet Paul Durcan brought all that very much to the forefront. Born and living in Dublin, he was also to a very considerable extent raised in Mayo. When that is your experience, where exactly is home? That question is addressed in one of his best known poems: ‘Going Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949’. In it, Durcan reflects on a journey he took as a five-year-old boy with his father to go ‘home’ to Mayo. In the poem, he talks about Mayo – Turlough, to be precise – as a place where you did unheard of things, like talk with your father as you walked through the high grass in the evening. He describes – full of excitement – how on the journey west they tried to pass out the moon, travelling through towns and villages whose names were ‘magic passwords into eternity’.

That part of the poem is full of light and wonder. But then of course, there is the return, the going back to Dublin, where he and his father live. And on that journey east, all the light and wonder disappear. For the reality of that impending return meant that you had to face up to the fact that ‘home was not home’.

Look into the eyes of any person ‘home on holidays’ the night before they return and it is that realisation which you will see.

That is why those of us born in Mayo and who have lived our lives outside the county appreciate fully what Durcan was talking about. That disconnect between home as a physical or geographic reality and the sense of home as the place you are from, the place you will always be from. That was highlighted by Paul Durcan’s funeral mass being in Dublin, but his burial being in Mayo. That last resting place is ahead for me.

Now, naturally enough, when you are away from a place – especially one where your most vivid memories are associated with the days of your youth – you tend to romanticise it. Your memories of it are in vivid colours. Mayo to me – home, to me – is the sun setting while on Croaghaun overlooking Achill Head, or basking in the water at Mulranny or on Inishturk, or getting hopelessly lost – and not giving a damn – on a sunny day in Erris.

That kind of stuff surely makes those who are here all the time roll their eyes. That is understandable too for those who don’t see as much romanticism in the mundane reality of the world where you make it. It isn’t all warm welcomes and sunny days admiring Clew or Killala Bay. If I had a euro for every person who said to me ‘well I wonder would you like it so much on a wet Wednesday in November’ I would be able to buy one of those holiday homes that were discussed so much last week.

And of course, we have always run the risk of remembering a home or a way of life that no longer exists, or exists only on a few magical days of summer. I remember a professor in Trinity some years ago telling a class about his long-standing research into migration and about his many interviews with people who had engaged in it. He said that the saddest piece of work he ever did was with a group who had returned to the west of Ireland to live out their retirement after many years of living away. He described how their excitement turned to bewilderment as they returned to a place which was entirely different to the one they had left. They had come home and found they were strangers, living in a strange land.

All the same, that I love my county as much as I do isn’t because – I hope – I don’t have a decent read of what life is like in it day in day out. The way the world is now makes it easier to stay in touch, to stay connected, to understand what is going on. And it also means that the gap between those of us who live away in big cities and those who live in rural Ireland is shrinking. It is far, far narrower than in the world that Durcan described in the winter of 1949.

But for all that I know my home place well today, it is not the same as it was back when I was a young man. At the heart of growing older is appreciating how a little of that world passes every day, and there is a loss in that which we all recognise. Yet as the past slips away, the beloved place endures. By keeping my relationship with it alive, by driving home to Mayo whenever I can, home remains the place that will sustain me into the future.