A Grief Deferred

This past weekend I visited home. The occasion, like most funerals and some weddings, was not a particularly happy one, but, like funerals and weddings, it provided a good opportunity to reunite with family. (The thing about having a large extended family — my mother is one of ten children — is that one rarely gets to see all of them together. It is genuinely pleasant to see all these people together, enjoying, for the most part, one another's company.) The most difficult thing about the whole affair, for me, was driving back to South Bend on Sunday: every time I return to South Bend I become more aware that I don't belong there. It was worst this time because the grief of this past occasion is still not fully computed and dealt with, and my absence from home isn't going to help. Lo and behold, Peters just wrote about the locality of grief:

We are going to travel some, all of us, and that, I suppose, is good. It is what I call a limited good. But we do the living no good, and the dead no honor, if we disregard our place. We should be home as much as possible. There are griefs to bear everywhere, and to some degree we can bear them anywhere — even distant griefs. But home is where most of them are — and where we bear them most fully, and best.

Home is unpleasant, in a few ways: certainly, I cannot deal with family all the time. (You are aware, no doubt, of the myriad specific ways in which family can be irritating.) But right now it looks like the minor irritations family can provoke are far preferable to the weight of guilt I feel for being away.