Feet in Nepal, head at home

In the first excerpt from ''Bittersweet," Matt McAllester confronts his mother's death.

Matt McAllester May 8, 2009 11:44Updated May 30, 2010 11:54

(Courtesy of Matt McAllester)

LONDON — On a quiet morning, I stood on a bridge over the canal in Little Venice with an umbrella keeping me dry. The late-spring rain pattered on the surface of this waterway that bends its way from West to East London, hidden for much of the way by homes and warehouses and tunnels. I was early for my appointment with the therapist whose ofﬁce was in the tall, white-painted Georgian house overlooking the canal. I had stood here before, more than 30 years ago, holding my mother’s hand as I looked down through the metal railings at one of the broad, low boats that take tourists through the city. I must have been two or three years old. It is the ﬁrst thing I remember.

But I had few other memories of London, purely because I was too young to remember much. We left when I was three, for Edinburgh, where I grew up.

After college I moved to the United States and soon after became a newspaper reporter. My newspaper sent me to the Middle East, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and I went gladly — went just about anywhere there was a conﬂict, anywhere I could dive into the pain of others and feel alive and invigorated by the most extreme experiences human beings go through.

After the invasion of Iraq and the increasingly bloody summer of 2003, however, an unstoppable impulse returned me to London, a city that I barely knew but that now seemed like the only place in the world I could live. My mother, my sister, my closest friends all lived in London. This was where my family, many years before, had been whole and happy. But though I had now lived there for more than a year, it was still a city I barely knew, because for much of that time I had been in Iraq or another country. I still needed the A to Z to ﬁnd my way around, to ﬁnd the neighborhood where I’d spent my ﬁrst three years. I knew Jerusalem and Baghdad much better than I knew London.

I turned my eyes from the water and moved toward the large white house. The trees along the canal were the yellow-green of high spring, and I had an urge to touch them and be surrounded in greenery. I had been running a lot in recent days, searching out the lushest, most life-ﬁlled parks I could ﬁnd. I wanted to roll in deep grass. I wanted to lie down sideways at the top of a grassy slope and roll down, over and over, until I’d reach the bottom all dizzy and be steadied by my mother, who would be waiting there.

I had not met the therapist before, but I knew he was a former foreign correspondent, which meant that there would be so much less to explain. He had helped other war-buffeted correspondents, their numbers growing quickly in the years of unending conﬂict since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and I was hoping he could help me. I had an important assignment for my newspaper coming up, and I needed to be a bit more functional than I was.

We sat down in his ofﬁce and he asked how he could help me.