You become an exile not at the moment you leave, but when you realise the place you left has changed without you. War speeds this up, so the person who comes back finds a home that no longer matches the one in their memory.
Before open violence, a society shows a recognisable pattern: people speak more harshly, harden into fixed opinions, and talk over one another. Everyone speaks and no one listens, and neighbours start meeting each other with suspicion instead of trust.
The more complex a social system becomes, the more its strongest members are drawn to make war on weaker groups, even when those groups are needed for everyone's survival. On this view, organised aggression is not a sign of backwardness but a feature that comes with advanced social organisation.
When a parent dies, the child who sorts through their papers and arranges the funeral is forced to face how much they never knew about that person. Mourning becomes a reckoning with both what was known and what was hidden, and that reckoning can bring the child closer to the parent than they were in life.
A person shaped by two cultures feels the split most keenly when they return home for a family duty such as a funeral. Old customs and modern habits pull in different directions, and questions about who they really are come up alongside family business left unsettled.