On November 15, 2012, I woke up to discover that my partner had died while we slept. He was forty. I was thirty-seven. Our kids were three and six. The cause would later be identified as an undiagnosed heart condition, but in the hours right after his death, I had no idea what had happened. I remember the seemingly endless procession of strangers who crowded into our small Brooklyn apartment that day. EMTs. Two incredibly young cops. A pair of detectives. The city’s medical examiner. All asked the same things. Later I realized that most of their queries were designed to clear me of any wrongdoing before they allowed me and my children to leave the apartment and decamp to my aunt and uncle’s home in the suburbs. But at the time I just couldn’t figure out why I had to keep repeating myself, and why—when I had called 911 at 7 a.m.—my children and I were required to remain in the apartment with my partner’s lifeless body still on our couch late into the afternoon.

Within thirty-six hours, my parents and my two brothers arrived from my hometown, Vancouver. Over the next few days, other family and friends showed up as well. I was shocked by the number of people who flew in from out of town for the funeral. “I can’t believe you’re here, that you came so far,” I kept saying.

A year and a half later, I was the one making a rushed trip across the continent. My mother had been diagnosed with cancer eight years earlier. After a period of remission, the cancer had returned, and my mother was dying. I booked a flight to see her one last time. Days later my father called to tell me her condition was deteriorating faster than expected, and I hurriedly bumped up the arrival date, changing my ticket to the next day. When my plane landed, I saw my father standing outside baggage claim, and I knew I was too late. At her funeral, I found myself uttering a familiar refrain to others who had traveled: “I can’t believe you’re here, that you came so far.”

That mobility—that ability to come from so far—was something I took for granted before the global pandemic closed borders and sheltered us in place. I’d been free from constraints that hamper so many others. Wars, travel bans, immigration quotas, incarceration, disability, financial difficulties—none of these things had ever prevented me from going where I needed, or wanted, to go. Mostly, I traveled to go home to Vancouver. Being a teacher meant I could often return for a week during the school year and then again for a month in the summer. I cherished that month at home. I spent it catching up with friends, sitting in my parents’ backyard, and taking my son and daughter on outings around the city. I even enrolled my kids in swimming lessons and summer camps there—the place that had shaped me was their place, too, I wanted to remind them.

Previous generations of my family could never have imagined such casual freedom of movement. My Jewish grandparents fled Nazi Germany for New York when my grandfather, Hans Lange, was thirty-nine years old and my grandmother, Kate Rosenberg, was thirty. Those they left behind perished. Those who escaped scattered to all corners of the globe. My grandfather’s siblings and father wound up in Shanghai, where his brother Horst set up a successful medical practice and the family members made good lives for themselves. When the communist regime took over and they were forced to leave, they reunited with my grandfather in Queens—having not seen him for over a decade. By then, my grandparents had met in their adopted country and married in a courthouse ceremony. What followed was many years of miscarriages and stillbirths. Finally, at thirty-eight, my grandmother had what was then called a “late-in-life” baby. My grandfather was a decade her senior, and he died while my mother, their only child, was still in high school.

My parents left their homes and families, too, though under very different circumstances. Both were newly minted historians, having met while graduate students in New York. It was 1974, the city’s economy was crashing, and my father accepted a job at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Back then, the same distances felt farther than they do now. There were no direct flights, and the infrastructure of low-cost air travel we take for granted nowadays—discount airlines, frequent flyer miles, regular fare sales—did not exist. Vancouver was a much different city then, too. It was far less multicultural, with a very small Jewish community at the time. It was also a slower city, one that—as my mother discovered after one too many bus trips with small children—would require that she learn how to drive.

To stay in touch with their families, my parents wrote lots of letters. They made carefully timed phone calls on weekend evenings, when the long-distance rates dropped. Once a year, they would go home to visit. Once a year, they would host their own families in the modest stucco house where my father still lives.

When I was a child, I found the thought of those losses overwhelming. My grandmother had endured the Holocaust murders of her parents and once large family. She had seen the destruction of her entire community. She had left the life she had known in Berlin and started again, utterly alone, in a foreign country. Once there, she had struggled with infertility, the loss of several pregnancies, and the loss of her husband. And then her only child had moved far away. There had been plans to get her an apartment in Vancouver, but the stroke put an end to them, and my grandmother spent the last seven years of her life in a nursing home a continent’s width apart.

Growing up, I vowed never to live so far from my parents.

And yet shortly after I graduated from college, I did just that. I wanted to see what it was like to live in New York. My parents encouraged me to get to know the city where they had both grown up, and thanks to them, I had an American passport and family who was happy to help me settle in. “I’m only going for a year,” I told my sweet boyfriend at the time. “We can be long distance. Plenty of people do that.” That year became two, and then more, and, as it happened, we did not turn out to be those people. Instead, I went to grad school, started a career, met the person I thought I would be with for life, and had children with him.

In the time following my partner’s death, I had been going back to Vancouver regularly. On one of those visits, I returned for a friend’s wedding. There I reconnected with someone I had known as a teenager. Even though he lived in Toronto and I was still in New York, we started dating. A few years later, we married in my dad’s backyard in Vancouver, and our long-distance relationship turned into a long-distance marriage. When he was finally able to move to New York, I was already pregnant. The baby arrived a few months later.

It was a series of unexpectedly joyful events following a series of unhappy ones. Suddenly, I not only had a new partner and new baby, but also a whole new side of the family as well. They were based mostly in Ottawa, which, unlike Vancouver, was a drivable distance from New York. Once or twice a year, my now sizable family would cram into our increasingly creaky old Camry to make the trip. Every few months, my in-laws would drive south to see us.

Then, in March of this year, the Canada–U.S. border closed because of the pandemic. The day of the announcement, I felt deeply unsettled. How long would this closure last? What if someone in my family got sick or injured? What if someone died? In a moment of panic, I tweeted at the Canadian Border Services Agency: if something happened to my in-laws or to my dad, would I still be able to come home? They didn’t reply, but eventually I got them on the phone. While travel was not recommended, an agent told me, if we quarantined for fourteen days after we arrived in Canada, as citizens we could be repatriated. “Canadians can always come back,” the agent calmly explained.

Upon hearing that, I felt such relief—and gratitude. I had lived in New York for over twenty years, but it wasn’t fully home. By now, neither was Vancouver. I imagine many people feel that way: rooted in multiple communities, and having the freedom—prior to the pandemic—to be able to flit between them as needed, keeping the bonds in each place strong. Unlike for my grandparents, and unlike for so many other people without the means or access, planting new roots had never forced me to unearth the ones I’d originally put down. Being separated from loved ones because of the pandemic has reminded me how privileged I am to have that mobility. That’s something I won’t treat nearly so casually, I hope, when the lockdown finally and fully lifts.

Ellen Friedrichs Ellen Friedrichs is a health educator and the author of Good Sexual Citizenship. Twitter | Instagram