Leaving Camden

Just as I had to dedicate a little piece to my leaving Bellingham for Camden, so I have to dedicate a little piece to my exit from JVC and the journey home. Here is a short series about the past couple of weeks and the events that came to pass.

My exit from Camden felt like a long fall from a cliff into deep water; that is, once my time there began to wind down (roughly around the time I packed up most of my belongings and shipped them home), it felt like I was slowly moving toward an end that took forever to come.

The goodbying began over two weeks before we were to actually leave town. This is because because there are so many people involved with the JVs who wanted to take us to dinner or something for a proper goodbye. To allow myself a moment of perfect honesty, by the end of those two weeks it was getting kind of hard to access any real emotion about leaving. In the first place, very many of the people who wanted to tell us goodbye were people that I didn’t know very well; I felt like I was getting to know them for the first time at my own goodbye party. Being fully present at those sorts of events was exhausting for me—I felt like I was trying to feign a lot of enthusiasm that I just didn’t have in me. This was hard for me to come to accept, because when I left a year ago I felt as though I was bleeding love and sadness, longing for a place I could return to and a time that I couldn’t return to. While intense, it was also great. I felt alive and in love with my family and friends.

Don’t take this to mean I wasn’t sad to leave; I certainly had to sort through a lot of emotional laundry about it all. But, while I can be quite sociable and enthusiastic at times, the fact is that I needed a lot of private, quiet time to process things that I just wasn’t getting. The end result was my feeling more or less numb about many things, when I should have felt some deeper feeling of warm sadness or bittersweetness. All the feeling within me for the bigger moments dried up as I tried to be present at events that didn’t mean as much to me. One can only have so many emotional evenings in a row before she shuts down. It was self-preservation.

There are two notable exceptions to feeling this way: my last day at Northgate, and the last time I saw my cousin, Nick.

On my final day at Northgate, I spent the bulk of the morning preparing cards and notes for my coworkers and some of the tenants (there are over four hundred tenants, total, so don’t think too lowly of me that I only wrote to a few!). Irma, the entire social services office, the management office, and the maintenance workers all threw me a little goodbye party. In a cute nod to my habitual grammar policing, they intentionally misspelled the writing on my cake. (Back story: every single cake we ever ordered for a social services or staff event has had a misspelled word—not because the baker messed up, but because whoever had ordered the cake had misspelled it on the form. I only ever pointed it out one time, but since then everyone derived a perverse joy from watching me read the misspelled cake and bite my tongue.) The cake read, “Fairwell, Molly!” Smart-asses…

It was very sweet of everyone to stop everything to see me off. I will be the first one to tell you that in that building, nothing ever stops moving. There is always an emergency to take care of, whether it’s a maintenance problem or a tenant’s physical or emotional health gives out, and the few of us on staff are constantly on the move, putting out fires as fast as we can. So a little cake, a little song, and a little prayer meant the world to me on my last day in the most intense environment I have ever worked in.

After I’d gone door-to-door in the apartment building to tell a few of my favorite tenants goodbye (word got around—it took me a good hour and plenty of running up and down stairs to get out of there. So many people wanted me to stop by, and because I have fewer mobility issues than most of the tenants, it was easier to just pass the word along that I should stop by!), turned in my keys, and hugged the social services ladies goodbye, I walked out of the building for the last time. I headed straight for the subway to Philadelphia to meet up with Nick.

For those of you who don’t know, Nick is my cousin. He served in JVC from 2000 to 2002, first in Camden, then in Brooklyn. (He lived in Brooklyn on September 11th, 2001. He was unharmed, but my whole family was terrified until we got a phone call from him.) Nick is also the reason I became a JV. He planted that seed in my heart when I was fourteen. Yes, many people and experiences watered that seed between then and the day I applied to the program, but he was the initial reason I wanted to serve with the Jesuits. It was great to live so close to him this year, especially because he has lived on the East Coast since his JVC service began.

Nick and I hung out in a bar for a few hours that Friday and just talked about my volunteer year. We talked about the best and worst moments, what I will miss, what I couldn’t wait to leave behind, how our volunteer service shaped us. Just before I left, Nick gave me a little post-JV-year pep talk. I swear, I would have given a whole year of service all over again, bearing every single burden I had to bear, just to hear that pep talk. It meant the world to me.

Because the truth is, (allowing myself another moment of honesty and vulnerability) this past year was unimaginably hard for me. I faced incredible difficulties in all facets of my life there—my work, my community, my city—and I confess, I have never felt so uncomfortable with myself or my surroundings in my life. Worse, as my entire life in Camden was defined in terms of either my community or my work, I had no outlet for my feelings. I missed home far more than I anticipated I would—even in late July, I would tear up from homesickness. I was fairly traumatized and hugely saddened by my work, and I never really felt as though I could discuss those feelings at home. In terms of close friendships and relationships, in the worst moments I felt that I had lost far more than I gained. Often I felt there was no one to talk to who made me feel understood, appreciated or loved. Although these feelings prove that I need to spend much more time on the Litany of Humility, the fact is that it is very hard to function emotionally and spiritually without feeling understood or appreciated. (In fairness to everyone in Camden, I always knew, even if I didn’t feel, that I was loved.)

So to hear such a sweet compliment from a family member, one that I have looked up to for as long as I can remember, and the only person in our family who can truly appreciate what I’ve been through (because we both went through it!), it validated and healed so much of what I was struggling with. It was the most understood I’ve felt in a long time.

The following day, I left Camden for the last time. All of my community members were returning to the house after Dis-Orientation except for myself, so I was the only one leaving for good. (On the way out of the city, I happily narrated a la Good Night, Moon: “Goodnight, row house!” “Good night, corner store!” “Good night, crackheads on the corner!” “Good night, Ben Franklin Bridge!”)

We drove south to Pine Grove Furnace State Park in Pennsylvania (where the hike was to begin), about 30 miles north of the Maryland border (where the hike was to end). We attended Mass as a group, drove to the campsite, pitched our tents, and crawled in for the night. The Hike to Dis-O would begin in the morning.