FOR SIX YEARS they lived abroad. He survived the heart attack he had only a few weeks after leaving Newfoundland. Four years later, one day after returning to Alberta after his first visit back to Newfoundland, he had a stroke.

They came back. Perhaps he had planned to do so all along, hoping that he would return to find the place as profoundly transformed as he had the first time he returned to it in 1949.

I flew home so I could be there to meet them when their plane touched down. When you turn the corner into the short corridor that leads to the terminal at the airport in St. John’s, you find yourself face to face with a throng of people gawking eagerly as if they have gathered to welcome home a local hero fresh from some triumph on the mainland.

I have never felt more left out, more self-consciously alone than when I’ve arrived at that airport with no one there to meet me. I was anxious that my father not feel that way, that there be among that crowd as he turned the corner as many familiar faces as possible.

He came down the tunnel holding my mother’s arm, while a flight attendant whose help he swore he did not need walked gingerly beside him. Many other relatives and friends were there, but the sight of me unsettled him. He looked as if he wondered if some stroke-induced forgetfulness had made him lose track of where I lived.

“You’re home again,” I said.

“Home again,” he said, smiling sheepishly as if he had been caught in some bit of foolishness. “You’re home again, too.”

“I just wanted to see the look on your face,” I said. “I’m just here for a few days.” We hugged. He seemed to have grown even shorter. I could have rested my chin on his head.

He looked around the small terminal, shaking his head in wonder, disbelief, dismay. Time, this time, had had no effect except on him. The past, neither by his leaving nor his coming back, had been undone.

But he had survived, he had seen through to its conclusion some inscrutable necessity.