I visited my grandmother’s grave yesterday.

It’s a small square of marble in a graveyard that usually seems a month away from being reclaimed by nature, but it’s been recently mowed. It’s in the shadow of a church that was built in the 1200’s.

Every time I go home, home being Salisbury in this instance, it’s… different. It’s still home. It will always be home. But it’s been 24 years since I moved away, and I’m ever more conscious of how both it, and I, have changed.

Salisbury’s become a celebrity. I mean, to me it’s always been famous— for the Cathedral, for the Magna Carta, it’s proximity to Stonehenge and the White Horses of Wiltshire and Salisbury Plain.

Last year it became known, or rather notorious, not for its 13th Century gothic Poultry cross, but for an amateurish assassination attempt. It’s made it handy for reference, people who keep up with current events have at least heard of it, and don’t just assume it’s “Where the steak comes from (that’s a Dr. Salisbury, you bastards).”

I digress. This post isn’t about fad diets, or Russians, or historical sights. It’s about mortality. Because every time I come home, I wonder how many more times it’ll be home.

I come to the UK to see family, to see friends, and to recharge, to remind myself that public transport is great and history can go back longer than a hundred years and proper fish is cod and grey is a common colour for the sky. To remind myself when to drop my t’s and h’s. To remind myself that not everything has to be box stores, warehouses that disappear in the distance and that taxes are useful for things.

That religion and science do not have to be mutually exclusive. That not everything has to be one side or the other, my way or your way, black and white. But every time I come home, I feel it slipping a bit more. There’s less a sense of belonging any more. I wander round Salisbury, smug in the conviction I appreciate it more than the people who live there simply because I don’t live there any more.

But what ties you to a place? What makes it home? Arguably, Eugene Oregon should be home, because my parents, brother and sister and their respective families live there. I feel no affinity for the place. Vegas? If I could take the friends and leave the place, I would.

It’s the people. People make the place. And apart from one or two friends there, I have my grandparents. What happens when they’re gone?

It’s a question I’ve been asking for probably a decade now. Grandad had a stroke almost 20 years ago, a severe one, and I’m not sure he was supposed to make it this long. And since then, between having one leg (the other was left in Italy in 1944), kidney problems, the incredibly rare form of cancer that no one at the hospital had ever seen (and some hadn’t even heard of it) he’s battled through way more than a lot of people.

The thing is, no one lives forever. It’s a given. Death and taxes. Although it’s proving pretty hard for me to pay taxes in the UK no matter how much I actually want to.

So right now I wonder if this is the last time he’ll be here. As I have every time for the last decade. I dread the phone call, I’m not going to be okay that day. But it’ll come one day (unless I bugger off the mortal coil first), that’s a given. And on that day, what will Salisbury become to me?

Will it just be another place I once lived, a place I visit on occasion with nostalgia, a place with two or three marble squares in a small graveyard that is a convenient place for tradesmen to duck out off the street and enjoy a smoke and a bacon sarnie?