This holiday season marks the first time since Covid that I have returned home to see my family: my mother, my siblings and their families, and my son and his family. I love them dearly but I’m not going to lie — there’s a small amount of anxiety from having been gone so long. My mother is 86 and not in the greatest of health, which is one of the reasons we have stayed away. But, as much as I long to be there, it’s always difficult to go home again; there are always so many changes and the altered terrain unbalances me. And whether it’s parenting styles, religion, politics or good old-fashioned sibling rivalry and the fact that I moved away, there’s always a potential for friction. As usual, I seek comfort and support from books.
I have gathered a short stack of books with the theme of going home. Many of these have lingered on my to-read list for quite some time.
“A Death in the Family” by James Agee is a classic published in 1957 that I have yet to read. The story is about Jay who rushes back to his home in Knoxville to help his dying father. His father recovers but, on the way, Jay is killed in a car accident. I’ll be honest; this book might be too emotional for the moment but I chose it because of this quote:
How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. So far, so much between, you can never go home again. You can go home, it’s good to go home, but you never really get all the way home again in your life. And what’s it all for? All I tried to be, all I ever wanted and went away for, what’s it all for?
Just one way, you do get back home. You have a boy or a girl of your own and now and then you remember, and you know how they feel, and it’s almost the same as if you were your own self again, as young as you could remember.
Another classic that has lingered on my to-read list is Thomas Wolfe’s “You Can’t Go Home Again” originally published in 1940. It tells the story of a novelist that infuriates friends and family when his autobiographical novel tells too much. When they run him out of town, he flees to New York, Paris and Hitler’s Berlin to eventually return to America with sorrow and hope. This is the quote that caught my attention.
But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth? He did not know. All that he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.
A newer possibility is “The Most Fun We Ever Had” by Claire Lombardo. It’s about a Chicago couple that has been madly in love for decades. When their four adult daughters, who are all facing their own traumas, return home they unbalance the family and old resentments, fears and anxieties surface — especially the anxiety of whether they will ever find the kind of love that their parents have. But this is the quote that caught my attention because I definitely know the feeling of trying to find space in a crowded family.
The world as it was would almost never be the world you wanted it to be, and there was a certain pleasure in finding your space in the schism.
“This is Where I Leave You” by Jonathan Tropper is another good choice. Judd Foxman goes home for his father’s funeral (without his cheating wife) and, for the first time in a long time, his entire dysfunctional family is together. But isn’t every family dysfunctional at times? This book promises that it is “riotously funny” so I have hope. At least there is this:
You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you’ve lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.
I have a short list of other possible reads about going home here. I will face the change. I will bathe in the love of my family in spite of the distance we have endured. I will remember that home is a precious idea no matter where we are. I will embrace both space and togetherness. I hope the same for all of you.
Happy Holidays!
Image credit: Susan Drury, Snow Mountains via Flickr (license)
