Josef Returns to Wyoming After the Funeral

After the funeral, Josse returned to Wyoming, making departure from his family a second decisive act in the aftermath of his brother’s death. The choice brought him back to the life he had been living in the United States, but it also left his parents to continue their grief without him.

The Departure

The journey began with his return to Schleswig for the funeral. After thirty-four hours and four changes, he reached Frankfurt, where he waited for a connecting flight to Hamburg. His parents and surviving brother came to meet him. Through a large glass pane, before they saw him, he watched them sit motionless on a bench while other travelers hurried to greet and embrace their returning relatives. He had imagined his own homecoming differently: as a fit basketball star, speaking fluent English with shining confidence. The family embraced when they finally saw one another, but the scene he had anticipated did not come to pass.

Although Josse understood how difficult his absence would be for his parents, he decided to fly back to Wyoming. They never tried to stop him. Only once did his father, leaning over an armchair and crying, ask whether Josse might rather stay with them. Josse nevertheless wanted to return, and insisted on doing so. The departure therefore carries a sharp contrast: his father’s plea makes the family’s need visible, while Josse’s decision shows that he could not—or would not—remain with them in their grief.

Resuming Life in Wyoming

Fourteen days later, Josse was back in Laramie with his full host family. No one at his high school knew about the accident; outside that household, no one offered him sympathy. He found this absence of attention comforting. Instead of being continually addressed as bereaved, he was able to carry on as he had before the accident.

In the months that followed, ordinary activities accumulated around the loss. Josse played basketball, learned to throw a football and carve a giant turkey, shoveled enormous quantities of snow, and met a girl at a hot-tub party. He also went on long rides across the prairie, visited a prison where he found a pen pal, and took extended trips with his host parents. The list is not a declaration that the loss had passed: it sits beside his admission that he refused to mourn. He thought of his brother only rarely, usually after Sunday telephone calls with his parents.

Return and Aftermath

When Josse eventually left the United States and returned to Schleswig, he weighed ninety-five kilograms, could do one hundred push-ups, and spoke fluent English. These measurable changes give the exchange year a visible outcome, while the distance between them and the unresolved family loss remains. The return was not a simple restoration of the household he had left.

His parents had become different people after the accidental death of the narrator’s second-oldest brother. Although they both went back to work, supported one another in their sorrow, ate together, watched television, and took walks, Josse saw these routines as a simulation of their former life: an effort to remember who they had been and how they had lived. With his eldest brother studying in Munich, Josse was the only child left at home with his parents, in the family house within the psychiatric hospital. His return thus placed him inside a household trying to rebuild ordinary life, even as his own months away had been shaped by a refusal to grieve.