My mother was sick. She was sick, and she fought. She was sick, and she fought…but she finally decided enough was enough. She passed away a few weeks ago.
Hi, everyone. It’s been a while. As you might guess, I haven’t had much bandwidth for writing book reviews over the past couple of months. I have done plenty of reading, but any spare time that hasn’t been spent caring for parents has gone to writing grad school assignments rather than snarky and/or enthusiastic blog posts filled with GIFs.
But Mom’s first week with in-home Hopsice care happened to be the same week I’d registered for an online reading/writing retreat centered on Pride and Prejudice. (It was run by Common Ground Pilgrimages, and seriously folks, if you love books as much as I do, I cannot recommend their programming highly enough.) I’ve always loved P&P — it’s tied with Northanger Abbey as my favorite Austen work — but the timing of this particular reading means that now I will always cherish it in a new way. Thanks to pop culture takes on Austen, it’s easy to read her works focused on marriage and romance. This time, rather than focusing on Mr. Darcy (about whom I have mixed feelings anyway), I paid far more attention to Longbourn. I focused on the Bennets’ home instead.
I have always looked at any talk of property in Austen’s novels through the class system lens, and rolled my eyes at it. “All these people care about is acquiring more money,” I might say, “or at least holding on to the wealth they already have. How shallow can you possibly be?” But now, facing the death of a beloved parent and knowing that death most likely will result in having to sell the house I grew up in, I’m looking at the Bennets’ need to hold on to Longbourn in a very different light.
[Obligatory Good Progressive preamble paragraph here in which I acknowledge the privilege that allows me to have grown up in a family who lived in the same house most of my life, and who eventually were able to buy the house they were renting, and allows me to take time off work to take care of my mother, blah blah blah. Privilege dutifully acknowledged, and privilege be damned –helplessly watching a parent wither and die of cancer in front of you sucks beyond all measure and that’s pretty much all I have emotional space for right now.]
But back to Longbourn. Even in Austen novels, a house means more than wealth (though it is also wealth and status, of course). A house is made of memories. Lizzie isn’t just throwing away her family’s security and future when she refuses Collins: she’s throwing away her family’s history as well. Every secret whispered to Jane. Every daughter’s birth. Every walk taken on the grounds. Every time she read a book in the library with her father. Every time a member of the family hid in a corner for a moment’s peace. Every quietly broken heart (or loudly broken heart). Every shared eyeroll. Every worrisome illness, and the rejoicing when that illness was overcome. Every Christmas, and every obsessive preparation for every dance. Good times and bad. Longbourn is more than a house and servants. Longbourn is the collective childhood of the Bennet sisters and the culmination of the family that Mr. and Mrs. Bennet have created. (Which makes it even more interesting to reflect on the many instances when Austen conflates descriptions of houses with descriptions of their owners. When she describes Darcy’s house as “handsome” and “lofty,” for instance.) Lizzie turns down a chance to hold on to that past happiness for an unknown future that may – or may not – contain unknown happiness of a different kind. The girls won’t just be destitute, they will be HOME-less.
There’s this cliche that movies always use to establish a well-loved family home. Nothing snazzy, maybe just a closeup shot of a set of ascending marks on the wall, labelled with a child’s name — or multiple sets of marks with multiple children’s names, for added pathos. If the movie wants to be less subtle, it might feature a golden-tinged montage of the little tykes growing like weeds, running excitedly to the wall to have each increment of their growth documented. We don’t have any of those markings in my childhood home. (Possibly because I stopped getting taller around sixth grade, and resented that fact. But I digress.)
There are other marks on the walls, though. Marks from my guitar cases, age ten onward, when I ran too hurriedly to my room coming home from practice. Grimy handprints on the kitchen doorframes that Mom never got around to painting over. Countless pin holes in the wall of an adolescent’s room that was decorated and redecorated with posters and magazine cutouts of her favorite bands. And there are memory marks on the house, as well. This the is banister I tried to swing from then ended up breaking my wrist in middle school. This is the bed I grew up sleeping in, but instead of here it used to be over there, where I talked to the boy I loved on the phone until 4am one Christmas Eve. This is the living room hastily transformed into a makeshift bedroom that summer in college while I recovered from a terrible car accident, and had to sleep downstairs for months because I couldn’t climb stairs. The same room where Hospice carried my mother down the stairs into a loaned hospital bed, in what would be her last trip down those stairs. Now it will always be the room where my mother died.
I’m grateful that my mother was able to pass away at home, Regency era-style, surrounded by familiar objects and windows and curtains and lamps. I’m grateful that she spent her last breath in the home she poured so much of her soul into. It’s only “stuff”–until it’s not. Until it holds meaning. Until it holds history.
Looking around at the house that helped shape me, and knowing that I may have to finally say goodbye to it sometime soon, feels almost unbearable. And I’m grateful that I won’t have to say goodbye right away because I don’t know that I could take another loss that big at the moment.
So I may not approve of your methods for holding onto Longbourn, Mrs. Bennet, but…I get it now. I really do.
Bookshelves & Babble 