Sickness of Separation: Reflections on Expatriation, Repatriation, and Motherhood

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this lived narrative, I revisit my youngest son’s dramatic departure from Lebanon to the US, hours before the Beirut Port explosion on 4 August 2020. Against the backdrop of the calamitous year that follows, the essential processing of the emotional ills of mother–child separation—aggravated by the trauma of the port disaster and a progressive implosion of society—is resurrected as Lebanon recognises the one-year anniversary of the catastrophe. This experience binds to those of countless Lebanese families, past and present, braving the departure of a child who both seeks and embodies a hoped-for brighter future. Even as my story dwells in universal themes, it unravels within a unique personal context. I am myself an immigrant, having moved nine years ago with my three sons from Boston to Byblos to fulfil the dying wish of my late husband, who escaped Lebanon during its civil war to settle in America: that we live out our lives with his extended family in Lebanon. In the shadow of his father’s remembrance, my son’s expatriation forces the reckoning with my unresolved grief and uncertainty, even as I acknowledge, too, fleeting fragments of beauty—redemptory gifts revealed through the ageless rituals of everyday life.