I was talking to a friend about much we hate leaving our dogs when we travel. She was looking at ten days in a tropical paradise, and dread had set in weeks ahead of time. I understood this completely. Sometimes I’ll be at Lowe’s when a dome of homesickness lowers over me and I’ll have to put down the nails and the laundry organizer and drive home immediately.

I asked my husband if this ever happened to him.

 “If for any reason I want to stop mid-errand, I ask myself, Am I finished? If I am not, then I continue until I am,” he said. This is how he earned the nickname The Finisher.  

It matters not what deep competing desires, or whiny, inconvenient emotions erupt, my husband is going to finish doing whatever is on his list for the day. It’s a relic of a compulsion passed down from his parents, who consistently blasted through the fog of misery (illness, grief, childbirth) to go to work, clean the house, tend to the yard, and create massive eight-course meals consisting mainly of carbohydrates. In other words, he did not earn the nickname The Finisher in a vacuum.

My problem with homesickness is not new. When I was little, I got homesick when I went to other kids’ birthday parties. Later I got homesick when I went away to college. Now I get homesick when I go to Aldis. I’m not sure what, exactly, creates that hollowed out, hopeless feeling in the pit of my stomach when I’ve been away from home too long (anywhere from an hour to a few days), but it has cut short many a foray across town, and ruined all of my trips abroad.

While it always feels like the homesickness is about missing my dogs, it’s more complicated than that. When my husband and I went to Paris ten years ago, the last of our three old dogs had died. We were scheduled to pick up our new rescue pup when we returned, a dog we’d yet to even meet. This meant there were no dogs at home to pine for, and none pining for me.

And still I pined. I pined as we strolled down the beautiful Champs-Élysées; I pined as we ducked into pastry shops for buttery croissants and sweet madeleines; I pined loudly as we gazed up at the illuminated Eiffel Tower at night, owing, I suppose, to the etherealness, my personal cue for deep grief and yearning. I pined so much on that trip I got physically sick, and it wasn’t until we got back home that some obscure, yet keenly felt imbalance righted itself, and I was able to collect myself and function as a competent human being again.

Does this deter The Finisher? It does not. Even though I am a colossal suitcase-dragging burden, my husband still wants me with him on trips. It would seem he is not yet finished with me.

A few years after Paris, I agreed to meet him in Stinson Beach, California for three days. He had traded a spectacular piece of artwork for a three-day stay in an equally spectacular VRBO on the bay, and a few of our friends would also be there. We would explore the towns nearby, eat lots of fish, and celebrate my birthday. There was nothing about the trip that suggested I should be in distress, with the possible exception that the day after I returned, I was scheduled to have surgery on my hand for pain that had been plaguing me for months.

Need I even say it? I was looking forward to the surgery more than the trip.

Still, I was in a decent frame of mind to begin with, despite the fact that my aching hand was swaddled in a bandage, and I had started to miss my dogs on the way down the driveway. My first full day in California, my husband and I got into a rental car to take a lovely drive; five miles in, I had an epic meltdown because he had not asked me how my hand was feeling, and the lack of inquiry felt like an accusation, and, concurrently, I was certain my dogs had thrown themselves onto sharp objects at home while the dog sitter wasn’t looking, and possibly the house was also burning down.

My husband pulled the car over. He reassured me that his lack of inquiry about my hand was simply an oversight and not a silent commentary on my failure to push through the fog of misery, the way his parents would have, and put the pain behind me. He reminded me that I always assume the worst about the dogs when I am gone (and also admitted that the kamikaze scenario in which the dogs were self-bludgeoning was wickedly creative, which did make me smile).

After our talk I was able to stop crying long enough to follow him into a cheese store, where we  bought some cheeses and fig bread and ate them in the car. As we wound through the mountains, I considered asking if my burning house scenario also had creative merit, but decided to let that one go.

For a day or so, I thought that perhaps I had had a breakthrough, that I was now actually really and truly fine on the trip. Maybe, I thought, this was my version of “pushing through the fog of misery” to finish something important, that something being a halfway enjoyable trip with my husband. But the next morning I awoke with a shingles blister on my hand that sent lightning strikes of pain radiating through my palm, which seemed to be some kind of message from the universe that either the dogs had in fact suffered a tragic end, OR I was (metaphorically) really and truly losing my grip.

And still, my husband is not finished with me. Next year we are going to Japan. I’m so excited I could cry.

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Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist and Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. More at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].