Last night – what we didn’t realize would be our last night in Timisoara for now – we listened to Leonard Cohen’s Going Home. As I write my last blog from Timisoara the words below sit in front of me and capture my mood.

Going home

Without my sorrow

Going home

Sometime tomorrow

Going home

To where it’s better

Than before

We met so many wonderful people in Timisoara and wish we could stay longer. As I returned a few books today to the American Studies library at West University in Timisoara and walked the empty corridors I was struck by how grateful I was to have this chance to spend time in this place with these people and to share this experience with Rebecca. COVID – 19 and its consequences are bigger than any of us and it is time to give in to the reality of the situation and join the many who have had their own experiences cut short or their lives changed in ways they are only beginning to understand.

I am going home “without my sorrow” because this experience will live forever in my heart. It will continue to give back to me and from me to others. Cristina, Ludovic, Karola, Horia, Titsa, Laura, Mihai and…so very many others. I will never look at a map like the one below in the same way.

We are going home “sometime tomorrow.” Early this morning we talked with a travel company working with the Fulbright program. A kind, patient, and very efficient agent put together an itinerary. Tonight we fly to Bucharest and then tomorrow from Bucharest to Amsterdam to Atlanta and to Kansas City, arriving around midnight Tuesday. Friends are bringing Rebecca’s car to the Kansas City Airport and we will drive to Decorah, stopping briefly in Clarinda. And then self-isolating.

“To where it is better than before,” somehow, I think this is so. A mess in America I know, just as it is in Romania, with people out of work, isolated, anxious and fearful. People have died, others will get sick and die. Maybe you, maybe me. I don’t know what to make of all of this. I have no answers so how could home be “better than before?” Except for this, when we go home we know we will have two weeks of self-isolation. Millions of others are doing the same, mostly without anyone following them around to see if they are doing the right thing, meaning the right thing for others as well as for themselves.

We left America as individuals; we are coming home as Americans.