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“I made a big mistake.”

“About Exeter?”

Yes, I made a big mistake. You should be with us for that time. I should never let you go there.”

“So why did you?” I said.

“Because I didn’t know I was going to die.” –Chang Rae Lee’s, Coming Home Again

It is possibly one of the greater questions of the human condition—why we fail to value time or appreciate time spent until there is none left. This idea stood out to me as I finished reading Chang-Rae Lee’s Coming Home Again. While we are alive, time seems infinite and we can easily feel invincible. Family members and friends are often blurred together in a midst of repetitive days and daily functions, feelings are silenced by the technology we have worked so hard to establish, and complications are never truly worked out. In fact, they are avoided, ignored, brushed or simply shipped away—which was the case we saw in the story.

As the narrator reflects on his mother, her overall presence and the relationship they had despite her decision to send him to boarding school, regret settles in. I have yet to experience death, which is impossibly evident even now as I write, but I could imagine that deeper than the anguish it is to die when you’re not ready is to die with regrets. To recount the moments you sold due to complications, and to remember the times when fighting to create these moments were never seized. By the story’s end, we find the narrator’s mother regretful of her decision to send her son to boarding school—which ultimately strained their relationship. It makes me wonder, if in fact, she was not dying would the regret present itself?

The cycle of life 

She said that if she had known she was going to die, she wouldn’t have sent him there. But that entire concept makes me question. We all know that someday we are going to die. Our flesh will cease to function and we will deteriorate with the passing of time. If we have this idea already embedded in the back of our minds, why is it so hard for us to embrace each moment today as if we were dying tomorrow? These thoughts of infinity and invincibility die when we do, so those thoughts in themselves are self-damaging. They rob us of moments we can’t get back because we believe time will present these opportunities once more. They rob us of productive tomorrows because we are living reckless todays. Coming Home Again helped me to consider the cycle that is life, and the error that is the human condition.