When she came home, she talked for two days and is still working through the experience. She’s going with a friend to a Grateful Dead concert tonight—something she would not have done before the reunion. Revisiting the music of one’s youth is part of the reunion with self. Whatever your parents may have thought of the music, however the music may survive the test of time, if it was the music you listened to in high school or college days, then it plays forever in some ballroom of your mind. You can still mouth the words and do the dances.
My wife’s moment of truth at the reunion was the memorial service for the members of her class who had died. Twenty of them. She’s a doctor, and she knows about death. But this was different. Twenty people her age—people she knew, people like her—had already come to the end of their lives. Finitude. Life is short.
And like most of those who go to such occasions with their eyes open, she came home with a revived sense of what is consequential and who is significant and what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. A new set of hopes and dreams tempered now by the view from the middle of life and the experiences of the road taken so far.
She compared her life to her peers’ and saw what there was to like about herself and what she still might become. And in seeing how time and experience had molded some seemingly confused and useless college students into pretty fine and serviceable human beings, she felt good, knowing she was one of those.
And I am a beneficiary of her reunion, even though I did not go.
She saw the men she might have married.
And is glad she waited for me.
Some people never go to the reunions or go just once. Some regret going. And there are those who attend every reunion occasion that comes up as long as they live. Whatever you are inclined to do, I have formed a strong opinion out of my experience:
The odds are in favor that the re-view in the mirror will lead you to the kind of self-revelation we associate with wisdom.
Which is why I always say you should go at least once. Go and see who you were or else you will never fully understand who you are and who you yet may become. The mirror always has something to tell you.
FAMILY
Let’s draw a distinction between a family reunion and reunion with family. They are not the same experience. One is a gathering of relatives. The other is a reconciliation with members of our family.
We all begin with the family that fate has assigned us and then leave that family in various ways, at least for a time, and go out on our own. We often look for what’s missing in our blood relationships and marry into or adopt a new family. At some stage, there comes the need for reunion or reconciliation with those we left behind. We call it “going home again.”
The classic form of this ritual is contained in an old, old story, kept alive in our cultural tradition because it is constructed out of our deepest longings. I’ll give you a modern version.
There was this young guy—call him Jack—who decided to leave home. His parents had mixed feelings about it. Of course, they wanted him to grow up and be his own man, but they also thought it was too soon—he was still so young, maybe he should finish college first or at least just get his own apartment on the other side of town.
The young man thought his parents were too domineering and couldn’t see how grown up he really was. Not only did he want to leave home, he wanted to get as far away from home as possible. And never come back. Furthermore, he wanted to take his share of the family resources with him to stake his future.
There was a full-force family fight over dinner one night. Hard words, the throwing down of napkins, chairs pushed away, and a walking away in different directions, slamming doors behind. It left family unity as dead and picked-over as the roast chicken on the platter.
Nothing the father could say would change the son’s mind. Finally, in the kitchen before he left for work the next morning, he asked his wife to give the kid some money—he washed his hands of the whole mess. He’d done all a father knew how to do. To hell with him. The father privately thought he should have raised dogs instead of kids—at least the dogs would be dead by now. The father was bitter.
Now the mother knew two things that neither the father nor the son would admit: one, the son was just like his old man, and two, his old man had run away from home when he was about the same age and joined the navy. She also knew it was not the time to bring these matters to the attention of the son or the father.
She wrote a check. Tearfully, she gave it to her son. Watched him throw his baggage into the back of his old car and drive off. It broke her heart to see him go.
The son didn’t write. Or call.
The mother grieved and worried. The father cursed the day he had ever had a second son. His older son was not like this rebel. The older son stayed home, finished his education, married a nice girl, had a nice son of his own. This son came to work in the family business, came over to eat Sunday lunch and watch football on the TV. He helped his father chop wood in the fall and prune the fruit trees in the early spring. He never forgot birthdays, Mother’s Day, or Father’s Day. He even painted the garage, on his own, to surprise his father, for no good reason at all. The Good Son. God bless him.
Meanwhile. The younger son went to San Francisco, got a job in a restaurant waiting tables, rented a small apartment, and spent his spare time hanging around the music scene. He slept with quite a few women. He started drinking and doing drugs, lost his job, sold his car and possessions, and ended up on welfare. In desperation he found work washing dishes in a nightclub, and slept on the floor on a mattress in a back room. His health deteriorated, but he had no money for a doctor. Hungry, hungover, sick, lonely, depressed, and friendless, he began to think of home.
One day he borrowed money from the nightclub manager and rode twenty hours on a bus, arriving in his hometown on a Sunday morning. Alone and unrecognized, he walked around town—down the main street, past his grade school and high school, past the church where he had been an acolyte, and finally, he turned onto the street where he grew up. Slowly, he walked toward home. He was scared, so scared. “What if they don’t want me? …”
Many a time his father had sat alone in the front-porch swing, looking down the street. His father had composed severe speeches in his mind: If that damned kid ever showed up, he’d strip a few pieces of hide off him—how dare he leave and never write or call! These hot speeches masked his grief and anguish. God forbid something awful should have happened to his son.
His father saw him coming.
As if in a dream, he stood up, walked slowly down the sidewalk.
The son saw his father coming to meet him.
As the father lifted his arms and held them outspread, the son did the same and ran and threw his arms around his father. His father pulled back from the embrace long enough to look in his son’s face. It was the first time the son had ever seen his father cry. “Welcome home,” he said. “Welcome home.”
The parable of the Prodigal Son has many interpretations.
The story lives on because it contains elemental human truths about the stages of reunion: separation, alienation, forgiveness, acceptance, and blessing. Our own family reunion experiences may vary in intensity and vary in details, but not in basic form.
This old story goes to the heart of reunions with family. The rite of passage is that moment of crossing over from separation to reconciliation between members of a family—most powerfully between child and parent. And even if it never happens—even if the reunion isn’t completed—it’s universal that we want it to happen.
“I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you.”
“It’s all right—we’ll work it out.”
“I love you—no matter what.”
This is the language of the ritual of reconciliation.
It is what we want, what we need … what we long for.
Sometimes the ritual of separation and reunion is subtle.
A friend has a powerful mother. She has s
tood in awe of her mother all her life and has no rational cause to feel anything but respect for her. She is a good mother. The daughter is a good daughter. Her mother reciprocates the respect. They are proud of one another. On the surface, you would see the evidence. The observance of family rituals is formally reliable. Birthdays, anniversaries, and seasonal holidays have always been observed with cards and gifts. And they have always maintained a regular correspondence by letter and phone.
Yet the mother and daughter have not been close since early childhood—never really intimate. And the daughter has spent most of her life living away from her mother. The daughter has never felt there was anything her mother needed from her. And the mother has felt she raised her daughter well, and her daughter could make her own way in the world without any help and handle the consequences of her decisions on her own. Or so they’ve said.
They have a workable relationship. But not a satisfactory one.
Last year the mother had a stroke and was hospitalized for several weeks. For the first time, she confronted her own finitude—realized that she will die. The father was thrown for a loss—demobilized by his wife’s illness. Now, for the first time, the daughter stepped into their lives as the strong and capable member of the family, taking charge of family affairs and dealing with the emotional needs of her father and mother. The intimacy long missing between them came to life.
Sitting for hours at her mother’s bedside, the daughter observed the ritual of remembrance—sorting through her life with her parents, seeing her mother as another human being, considering her mother’s life in light of her own experiences.
She and her mother saw one another in each other’s mirrors. In some unspoken way, her mother let go of thinking she always had to be the family rock and passed the responsibility on to her daughter. The daughter accepted. She, too, was ready to cross the threshold.
This ritual of the passage of power is never planned, really. When it happens with grace, there is reunion of a very special kind. The strings that bind the mother and daughter have been retied with the timely bow of another stage of life. They have welcomed one another home.
It doesn’t always work out this way. I know.
Both my parents died without any reconciliation between us. I, their only child, did not live up to their expectations. Nor did they to mine. I wish it had not been so, and they must have felt the same way. The ritual of reunion never happened. The distance between us was so great that I didn’t even attend their funerals.
Though I have tried to sort through that story to make sense of it, I cannot. Perhaps when I am older and wiser, I will understand. I only mention this because it is important to acknowledge how much I empathize with those for whom reunion remains an unfulfilled hope. Some things, when broken, cannot be fixed.
My parents probably wanted to welcome me home as deeply as I wanted to be welcomed. Now, in my later years, I sympathize with their sadness when, from time to time, a distance develops between me and one of my children.
I also know now that the ritual of reconciliation is forever intertwined with the ritual of rebellion. And I know that both rituals are likely to repeat themselves several times over in my children’s lives and mine.
Make no mistake: While these are not ritual events to which engraved invitations are sent, they are nevertheless rites of passage of great significance. The coin with which they are paid is pain—sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet, but pain, nonetheless. Nobody gets a free and easy ride.
At times, family reunion of the most solemn and serious nature is the underlying ritual for gatherings that are given other names and held for other reasons: Thanksgiving, High Holy Days, Christmas, birthdays, weddings, graduations, backyard barbecues, and funerals.
And then, there’s the Big One—the family reunion that happens around the fiftieth wedding anniversary of a couple who by now are great-grandparents—when everybody comes.
There must be some deep magnetism well below consciousness that draws related people together in these circumstances—something to do with genetic suction. The twisted helical complexity of the structure of DNA is more than an accidental model for what goes on around a family gathering.
It is compounded by what happens when you marry—you add all these other people to your life because you love their relative. It’s heartening when your in-laws seem to be a better deal as a family than your own. Of course. There’s no baggage from the past to carry. Ah, true, but the baggage is on the way.
I love the wedding and fiftieth wedding anniversary photographs with every member of both families all gathered together. You can see the truth in their faces. In more than one way, they are assuming a pose. Many of these people do not know each other. Some of the people who do know each other dislike each other. Many of these people do not want to be there and are not sure just why they are there. And many of them know that the others know that they know these truths. But, there they are. Smiling, smiling.
The reason they are there: “We just have to go.”
And they “just have to go” to funerals and Thanksgiving and all the rest. It’s asking for trouble to say, “I think your relatives are boring, and you can tell them I said so,” or “I am never going to be in the same room with your mother again,” or “They’ll never change.” You still have to go.
What amazes me is that we so often pull it off. We do.
The yearning is so strong within us for family integrity that we will go to great lengths to make the unlikely work out. We will compromise, conciliate, and accommodate over and over and over. We will go because we just have to go—because we need to believe that this time it will be OK. And sometimes, over time, it is. These family gatherings are not a celebration of the way things really are, but a ritual of hope—aimed at what we devoutly wish things to be.
This hope—this lifelong reaching—is why we do things that cause other people to say, “I can’t believe you did that.” It sends us off on long vacations with our parents and our children in the same car, even when we know what we’re getting into. It rallies us to get everybody together for our parents’ wedding anniversaries or big-deal birthdays. It carries us across country to some distant relative’s funeral, knowing everybody else in the family will have to be there, too. It makes us start sending birthday cards to relatives we hold in so-so esteem.
And for all the times I have sensed and heard, “God, I hope we don’t ever have to go through that again,” I have seen family war spears plowed under the ground of the goodwill that the passage of time and the human capacity for growth sometimes achieve. The ritual event sometimes results in that which is hoped for: a sense of re-connection—of belonging. We go to the family reunion and are, much to our surprise and satisfaction, finally, at peace with these people—home again.
ADOPTION
I’m really uneasy about telling this next story. It concerns an adoption in my own family. Part of me says to keep it to myself, and another part says there is good reason to share. I will feel better if I explain both why I’m telling such a personal story and why I will leave out some of the details.
For one thing, I’ve learned how many adoptions there are and how many lives are affected by a single adoption. There are nearly 7 million legally registered adoptions, as well as many that are not recorded. Directly involved, in addition to the child, are the two biological parents of the child and the two adoptive parents, as well as any siblings. If the adopted child eventually marries and has children, the spouse and children are also directly affected by the adoption experience of the parent. And where do you draw the line? If you add in the children who go with one parent in a divorce situation and are adopted by the new spouse, you’ve got a large percentage of the population not raised by both their biological parents. Adoption, like divorce, is a substantial part of our social structure—a fact of life in American culture.
Yet adoption is often a carefully kept family secret.
And I know how awful it can be to live with fa
mily secrets.
It may be useful for me to tell my own story and share my experience. This story also belongs to all those directly involved, and I am careful not to invade their privacy. I’ve a right only to my story, not theirs. But they have read the story you are about to read and are comfortable with what I’ve written and why.
I’ve never known anybody who didn’t have a skeleton or two in their closet. You know it’s there—and you get in the closet with it from time to time—a reunion with pain, sorrow, or demons. There are always those things we don’t want to talk to anybody about. Shame, guilt, and embarrassment are the locks on the closet door.
Over time, if all goes well, we come to terms with the skeletons in a way that allows our lives to go on. When things don’t go well, we turn to others for help with the rattling bones. Despite our own desire to keep our secrets secret, we are all comforted and relieved when we find out most everybody else is in the same fix as we are—almost everybody has a closet, a locked cabinet, or drawer somewhere.
Here’s something I’m sure of: Whether the skeleton is in or out of the closet, there is still anguish and suffering. Even if injuries heal, the scar tissue is always tender, and the wound may be reopened easily.
When it comes to family secrets, the problem is compounded because you are a co-owner of the skeleton. Other people are involved. It’s not just your story to tell—your skeleton to expose and bury—it’s theirs, too.
Leaving the matter in the closet is painful, but so is taking it out. You may heal yourself at the expense of damaging others in your family.
If you are adopted and seek your birth parents, your showing up may prove unwelcome and destructive. It happens.
If you’re gay and come out of the closet to seek your own wholeness, your family may be divided and even destroyed. It happens.
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