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When a large immigrant family filled the hospital room beside my mother, she felt alive again.

They’d recreated the village she left 55 years ago, the connected world most of humanity once lived in.

When this family left, she wept, grieving her lost village. And I saw she’d long ago passed that grief to me.

We all inherit grief for the lost villages, and this creates a deep longing to find our way home.

My mother is 85 and she is dying. I’m sitting beside her in a shared hospital room, holding her hand, reassuring her, because she’s scared of leaving everyone she’s ever loved.

A few days before I arrived, something unexpected happened. It began when an 89-year-old man was wheeled into the bed beside hers, a recent immigrant from a country neighboring the one she’d left 55 years ago. The way he spoke, quick to emotion, and the familiar tones of his language, deep, guttural, reminded her of her own grandfather.

Then, his family came to visit…

The Family Village: How Most of the World Still Lives

The old man’s family arrived by the handfuls, sons, daughters, and grandchildren, filling the room with voices and laughter and the smells of food from home; feeding the old man chicken noodle soup and sharing his sweet desserts with everyone who entered (attending nurses, on-call doctors, my own mother and father). This family arrived at all hours, the same way you might come if this were your own home (confident you’re always welcome, never needing to knock). They stayed much too long and spoke far too loudly, keeping my mother awake late into the night. But my mother never minded any of it. Quite the contrary.

The old man’s family created a felt sense of company and aliveness, and they did something larger and older: They rebuilt the sensory world of the village my mother had long ago left behind, reawakening a version of herself formed in childhood, never fully gone, shaped by her homeland. Her memories rushed in, from time spent in her family village made up of grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins living under the same roof, she the youngest of them all, the gleam in her father’s eye and the tag-along behind her older siblings and cousins.

My mother’s childhood family village is still how most of........

© Psychology Today