This is Where I Leave You

by Jonathan Tropper

You get married to have an ally against your family, and now I’m heading into the trenches alone.

At some point you lose sight of your actual parents; you just see a basketful of history and unresolved issues.

Childhood feels so permanent, like it’s the entire world, and then one day it’s over and you’re shoveling wet dirt onto your father’s coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.

“It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.”

You never know when it will be the last time you’ll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there’s always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you’d never stop grieving.

You can sit up here, feeling above it all while knowing you’re not, coming to the lonely conclusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don’t know anything about them at all.

Even under the best of circumstances, there’s just something so damn tragic about growing up.

That’s the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.

Sometimes, contentment is a matter of will. 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.

“A problem is something to solve,” Phillip says. “If there’s no solution, it’s not a problem, so stop treating it like one.”