Watching People Leave

This past week, a few close friends left South Bend for cities five hundred and two thousand miles away. Here I am at the Mar-Main, packing the moving truck, thinking of what David Giffels said:

“I have spent my whole life watching people leave. This is a defining characteristic of the generation of postindustrial Midwesterners who have stayed in their hometowns. At every stage of opportunity, at every life crossroads, friends and family members and enemies and old lovers and vaguely familiar barflies depart. Piles of demographic and sociological data chronicle this, the term brain drain serving as a sort of catamaran counterpart to Rust Belt.”

Then last night, I’m quoting that opening line to a friend at the Oyster when they recall a word from my essay Are You Staying in South Bend? :

“Growing up, I didn’t imagine my future happening here. Who did? I was a senior at Riley High when South Bend landed on the fabled ‘America’s Dying Cities’ list. If you accept that judgment about a city (I did), what sort of future could be tied up with it? It’s hard to imagine a happy life in a dying place.

… but what if I had lived with an open heart to the city all along? What possibilities do we miss by physically living here and mentally living in the future someplace else? I wonder what might happen if that person made the ever-so-slight shift to a five or ten percent chance that they might be the kind of person who stays in this kind of place.

Maybe they would still leave. Being open to staying doesn’t mean that you will, or that you have to. Over the past year, a number of my friends have left. But they all had an openness to the possibility of a place like South Bend while here, and I think each would say their life is richer for it.”

I’m looking at a note in my phone, an unfinished essay, about all of this. I started it in 2020 and each departure brings me back to write more—an annual ritual reliable as any holiday.

Once, I was recorded in a documentary saying, “I’ll be in South Bend the rest of my life.” I stopped saying that. Because I’ve known people who lived so beautifully open hearted to this city, and a few of them left last week.