This Is Where I Leave You

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of pregnancy loss and a nonconsensual sexual encounter.

The loss of a loved one is a significant theme throughout the novel and examined through the dimensions of family relationships, romantic attachment, and parenting.

Mort Foxman’s death represents an anticipated grief and the expected bereavement over the loss of a family member, as he suffered for months and received a terminal diagnosis. Still, it is a loss that takes the family time to process, and each character comes to terms in their own way. Hillary, who has had the most time to prepare, is already turning toward the future and her relationship with Linda. Wendy ruthlessly accepts reality. Paul, who has been handling the business, deals by addressing practical matters. Phillip, the most expressive of the siblings, reaches the funeral late, but openly sobs by his father’s grave.

Judd feels a more complicated grief, as his affection for his father is bound up with a sense of nostalgia, guilt, and disappointment. He suspects his father cared less for Judd than for athletic Paul or charming Phillip. He remembers his father pointing out to Jen that her children with Judd would not be Jewish. He rarely visited while his father was ill and regrets this lost time later. As evidenced by his dreams, Judd’s grief for the loss of relationship with his father—which began well before his father died—is tied up with his own sense of incompleteness. When Judd does at least recall a memory, after being electrocuted by the fuse box, it is an uncomplicated memory from his youth of a time when his father protected him, a memory that parallels Phillip’s recollection of his father standing up for him. This is the breakthrough that allows Judd to express his grief in the conventional way, through tears.

Judd is also dealing with other losses that present ongoing or remembered pain. The discovery that his wife was having an affair, which ended his belief that she loved and was devoted to him, is a huge grief for Judd. He feels sad and guilty about the stillbirth of his and Jen’s son, and he sees this loss as accelerating the distance that grew between them. Jen felt unsupported by Judd during her bereavement and turned to other sources for solace, including Wade.

In this and other episodes, the novel suggests that grief over an unanticipated loss, when not properly grieved or healed, can create an ongoing wound and change the course of a life. Paul grieved the loss of his baseball future by skipping college, living depressed at home, and then throwing himself into the family business—an attempt to make up the disappointment her perceives that he caused his father. Paul’s entire future changed with the dog attack that mangled his pitching arm, and Judd, too, feels grief for this. Judd also acutely feels the family’s grief for Horry, whose future changed abruptly by a different attack that left him with a brain injury that makes it hard for him to live independently. While Horry deals with this with his own brand of unsentimental reality, Judd pities Horry. He feels Horry has been robbed, much as Judd feels Wade robbed Judd of his wife’s affections, which left him angry, resentful, and self-pitying. His sense of victimization and unfairness has kept Judd from addressing his wounds in a healthy manner.

All the major characters carry some grief. Alice grieves because she has been unable to conceive a child. Wendy grieves the future she imagined she’d have with Horry. Penny has her own wounds, which she does not disclose, but Judd senses her sadness. While the action centers on the death of a family member and the rituals undertaken for mourners to come to terms with that loss, the novel delves into other ways that grief and loss shape people’s lives, and how mourning can either be a healthy process of resilience or a source of more pain.