What can Mercia do to keep herself together when she is clearly two different people? She is a professor from Glasgow who was left by her husband after 25 years, and on the other hand she is the original person she has always been. She is a Murray from South Africa, and although she doesn't really remember what that means anymore, she knows that it's important for her identity to make the trip, to see.
When she's there, she sees the portrait of sadness and brokenness that she might have expected based on the facts of the matter in the family, and the way they've had to navigate the volatile changes in South African culture and law. For the uninformed reader, South African history is a little bit gnarly, not so different than American history in some ways, and in some ways, perfectly different. But to Mercia, she isn't thinking about America whatsoever. She is examining her African culture for its European aspect, having seen life in Glasgow for 25 years.
The idea of becoming one person is also a nice symbolic depiction of South Africa's own journey toward becoming a unified culture. The challenges that race brings to the family and to their community is difficult to parse, but if she stays, certainly Mercia's mind could be used as a resource to help frame the situation better, but will her family understand her intentions? She considers life in Europe again.
