Where We Still Belong

There is a familiarity that doesn’t disappear.

A Charleston weekend and the quiet power of enduring community

We hadn’t seen each other in 25 years.

And yet—there we were.

Six of us, in Charleston, for a girls’ weekend. Women I had known at different depths, in a different season of life. Some closely. Some more peripherally. All of us connected by a shared past that had gone quiet for decades.

They all knew about Lee—his diagnosis, and his recent passing. One had walked closely beside me through the hardest part. The others… I had simply re-entered their lives.

It felt, at first, like leapfrogging over 25 years of living.

When we last knew each other, life looked very different.

Most of them were just beginning families—raising young children, building homes and routines that would shape the next two decades of their lives. Their days were full in ways I didn’t yet understand.

I was still single. Then I met Lee, and everything changed.

I left Washington, D.C. and built a new life—one that felt grounded, joyful, deeply rooted in a sense of home. And then, years later, that life narrowed into something else entirely as Alzheimer’s took hold.

So I arrived in Charleston with tempered expectations. Because what does it mean to reconnect after 25 years? Who are you to each other now?

There’s research on this—on reconnecting with what are called “dormant ties.”

💡We expect it to feel awkward. We assume too much time has passed.
But often, the opposite is true.
There is a familiarity that doesn’t disappear.
A shared history that quietly bridges the gap.

Still, I wondered how it would feel.

The Connection

Our connection to that past life revolved around a beach house that we used on the weekends. We were single, still building careers, had the whole world in front of us.

One morning, over coffee, I shifted the conversation.

“What do you remember most about that time?” I asked.

Before marriages. Before children. Before careers took shape and sent us in different directions.

There was no hesitation. We all landed in the same place. It wasn’t the big events. Not relationships. Not work.

It was the planning.

The Friday morning emails, coordinating rides to the beach house, figuring out who was arriving when, who was bringing what, the anticipation of coming together.

That was what stayed.

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And suddenly, it all felt familiar.

Because here we were again—25 years later—doing the exact same thing.

Weeks of planning. Zoom calls. Coordinating schedules, travel, what to pack, what to wear. All the small details that lead up to something shared.

And I realized—it wasn’t just the weekends themselves that bonded us back then.

It was the coming together. The connecting. The organizing. The shared energy of looking forward to something.

For me, this mattered more than I expected.

Caregiving had reshaped my life in ways that are hard to fully explain unless you’ve lived it.

Your world becomes smaller. More contained. Your attention is always outward—focused on what’s needed, what’s next, what might go wrong.

You become incredibly capable. But also… disconnected from yourself.

And here, in Charleston, something shifted. We were just six women planning a trip. Not caregivers. Not defined by careers or roles or losses. All of our labels in life faded for a few days.

Just… ourselves.

25 years ago, or now, some connections always remain.

There’s something powerful about that.

About stepping back into connection without needing to explain everything that happened in between.

About being known—not for your most recent chapter—but as part of a longer story.

And also, about realizing you don’t have to stay in the identity that carried you through the hardest season.

We’re already planning the next trip.

Six women, moving into a new phase of life—retirement, empty nests, new projects, new ideas about how we want to spend our time.

The lines that once defined our differences—who had children, who didn’t, who lived where, who chose what path—have softened.

Blended.

Become less important.

What remains is something simpler.

Connection. Shared history. A willingness to show up again.

And for me—a quiet return to myself. Through community and connection.

Not all at once.

But enough to recognize it.

I was a caregiver for my husband with Alzheimer’s. I write about Belonging to Self, Community and Home, both during and after caregiving.

If this would be of value to you to hear more about how I restored my sense of community after 4 years of caregiving, Subscribe to Vicki’s Substack, “The Tender Warrior.”

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