"...took a taxi and drove over to Marple Hall.  Last time I saw it was in the summer of 1948... Then it was dilapidated.  Now it is a ruin -- indeed, it has an almost gutted look, as though it had been bombed and burned... We went up the back stairs -- the front staircase looks unsafe and there is a great hole in the roof above it where the chimney-stack fell through -- and had to climb over the bathtub which had been dragged halfway down the steps and left stuck between the bannisters."

-- Christopher Isherwood [1904-1986], Diaries, Volume One, 1939-1960, Methuen London, 1996, p. 576-577, on a visit he made with his brother to the family's ancestral home in Cheshire, February 1956.

If Christopher had stayed in England, held on to Marple Hall, not come to California... except that he didn't, and didn't, and did.  The past is never about the choices not made, the paths not taken, but how temporary it all ends up being anyway, in the end.  

All we ever do is visit.  Friends, family, places you used to live, the past.  That's the point of visiting, after all.  It isn't staying.