You'd Be Home Now (101)
Someone I used to know said that’s the problem with adults. They just see kids as they want them to be, what they aren’t, and not as they are. I think about that all the time. Like, how much time and pain and suffering could be eliminated if you just accepted the kid in front of you and stopped trying to fix them. Maybe there is no “fixing.” Maybe there is just heartbreak and love and trying to help them stay alive, whatever it takes.
You don’t really understand that sometimes we need to see ourselves in the books you assign, in all our messiness and confusion. And in case you think I haven’t learned anything literary all semester, I can tell you that foreshadowing happened at my kitchen island in August, after my brother Joey returned from rehab and was presented with a list of rules he had to follow if he wanted to stay in our house. He came into the house with his head held high. He left the table with his head down, after reading all he would need to do to be loved. If I’d spoken up then, maybe what happened wouldn’t have happened. If I’d told my parents he relapsed, maybe what happened later wouldn’t have happened. I don’t know for sure. A smart person once told me that life is working against us all the time, inside and outside us, in a thousand different and silent ways that are invisible to us, and there is nothing we can do about it. You just have to do the best you can and go on, and hope for the best.
This is not going to be the thirty-page paper you wanted. I have to get up early in the morning and drive to see my brother at his new rehab center and that is my priority at the moment, not a school assignment. I think that in the grand scheme of things, you should be able to understand this. My brother not dying is my priority at the moment. And other things, too, like me figuring myself out a little (because I am a mess). And I know you are probably rolling your eyes at this moment and thinking that I could have “managed my time” better and that the due date has been on the portal forever, but I really couldn’t. I was busy being a liar, a wanton girl, a jewel thief, an enabler, a safecracker, a sister, and a daughter. Someday, I would like to read a book about that girl, to be honest. Find it and put it on your future book list, please.
The last thing I will say about The Portrait of a Lady is this: yes, it was written by a bespectacled old white man who, of course, controlled everything about Isabel and her interior thoughts, but there’s a lot he got right. And I think the thing he got most right is what I really hold dear about this book, and why I will probably read it several times over the course of my life.
It doesn’t give you a happy ending, because, well, life doesn’t. Not always. Sometimes it might make you wait a long, long time for it, and even then, it might not look like what you’d imagined.
Isabel has an earth-shattering kiss (I have recently had one of these, by the way, but we don’t have to go into that right now) with Caspar Goodwood and yes, how nice it would have been for her to go off with Caspar and not go back to Rome and to wrap the book up and give her great love and all that stuff. But she didn’t. She went back to Osmond, and to Pansy, and Henry James doesn’t really tell us why.
That, to me, is an honest and good way to end a book, because that’s exactly what real life is. It can’t be summed up tidily and neatly. You don’t know what is going to happen, or how things are going to end, and we probably get into way too much trouble trying to plan for and predict these things. But in the end, you just don’t know. My brother might come out of rehab and be okay for years and years, or maybe just a day, and then one of those thousand things working against him might win. And then we will be back to a place that’s kind of like when Caspar Goodwood says, “You must save what you can of your life,” and begin to rebuild, again.
I prefer to think of when Isabel is comforting Ralph as he is dying. Isabel says that pain is not the deepest thing and Ralph agrees, saying that pain always passes (I’m still torn on this, but I’m young, so we’ll see).
That’s how this book spoke to me. Sometimes your life falls to ash and you sift through, waiting for the pain to pass, looking for the remnants in the debris, something to save, when really all you need is right there, inside you. And next to you, hopefully, in the form of a person. Have you read this book? Do you remember what Ralph says to Isabel as he lies dying?
Love remains.
And that’s really all you can hope for, in the end. I have to believe that. I have to hold on to that.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As Ryleigh notes early in You’d Be Home Now, more than twenty million people in the United States struggle with substance abuse each year. If you think that’s only adults, think again: that statistic begins with users at age twelve.
Twelve. And that’s only what has been documented. Because substance abuse care hasn’t been fully integrated into our health care system, the number of kids and adults currently struggling is probably much, much higher.
Right now, a family member or a friend is probably struggling with substance abuse. You might know it. You might not. You may be struggling, and keeping it a secret, because you don’t know who to tell, or how, or where to get help. Maybe you feel ashamed, like you’ve let people down. Maybe you feel, like Joey does in this book, that you’re unworthy, or a loser.
You are not any of those things. Not one bit.
Addiction is a disease, plain and simple, and should be treated as such: with care, management, and empathy. It requires hourly, daily, and lifetime diligence. I have been in recovery for nearly thirteen years at this point. It’s painful and lonely and there are days when I feel like I can’t go on anymore. But I do. I keep walking toward the future, whatever it may be. I have friends and family and a group that I trust who walk this road with me.