Of course—as other respondents to my post reminded us—the world is full of people who have moved very far away from family, and don’t get to see them for years, due to lack of money. American history is also replete with examples of people who, for various reasons, found themselves separated from family by huge distances. Many suffered for it. In her Homesickness: An American History, Susan Matt found that homesickness and its companion, nostalgia, were omnipresent in American life before the twentieth century. Despite any impression we might have that the pioneers sported stiff upper lips, out there in their little houses on the prairie, the historical record is full of people weeping for the homes they left behind. During the Civil War, doctors for the Union Army diagnosed thousands of soldiers as suffering from “nostalgia”; some military bands were warned not to play the popular song “Home, Sweet Home,” lest their listeners reflect too much on what they were missing.

Perhaps we will look back at the decades before the pandemic as a historical aberration: a singular time, when a certain, privileged group of Americans could expect to use air travel to sustain their family ties and choose their homes accordingly. An analysis of data done by the New York Times’ Upshot blog in 2015 found that, overall, American mobility has declined in the past few decades. The median distance the Americans represented in that data lived from their mothers was only eighteen miles, and only 20 percent had more than a couple hours’ drive between them and their parents. “The biggest determinants,” wrote Quoctrung Bui and Claire Cain Miller, “of how far people venture from home are education and income.” (In other words, if you had college or professional degrees, you were more likely to live farther away from your parents.) Social scientists asked about their findings predicted that Americans, singularly dependent on family for childcare and eldercare, would become even less mobile in the future.