Family=Home

When I think of the word “home”, I think about a specific quote from the Disney movie Lilo & Stitch. The quote is “Ohana means family, family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.” This is exactly what a home should have. Not only that but a home should have family that is not forgotten or left behind. Family is an important component in a home because like an actual house a foundation is what holds the walls and ceilings together and that is exactly what a family does. A family is there to hold everyone up during rough times. Without family a home can not stand on its own. In Robert Frost’s “Home Burial”, the author uses the disconnected family to define home as being entirely family-based.

When reading this poem, the reader understands that the home in the poem is not the perfect and usual home. It is not the perfect home because there is tension between the husband and wife. As the reader, I can assume that this married couple have not communicated since their child died, and they have both been unhappy since then. I can assume this by the following dialogue between the husband and wife speaking in that order, “‘Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?’/ ‘Not you!’” (35-36). After reading the argument the couple had, I began to understand that they were two different people. Besides their obvious physical differences, the couple each had very different ways of responding to the emotional distress of losing a child. The woman’s way of mourning the loss of her child, not to mention her first child, was showing it physically like staring out the window of the grave in their yard as if she has not forgotten about it. As for the man, he grieved by taking on the job of digging his own child’s grave. I believe this was his way of expressing his feelings because he could have easy had someone else do it, but since it was his child that was the least he could have done. It was the last thing he could do since he bought the kid into the world and is now putting his body to rest in the ground. It is easy to conclude, that since they both had different ways to grieving for their lost child they did not help each other get through it like a family; therefore, the grief destroys their home. Instead, they did not share what they felt to each other, which lead the wife to believe the husband did not care much for the loss. The wife does not realize that digging up you own child’s grave is a lot to do for a parent, but that is exactly what her husband did. He did it not only for himself, but for their child.

Furthermore, since the man and woman did not communicate or help each other through the loss it made their home not so much a home. What I mean by this is a home should be a place where you are happy and if not happy it should be where the people as in family in your home are the ones who try and make you become happy. But they could not make each other content because they were holding in what they felt. Specifically, the woman did not tell her husband how she felt about how he acted during the loss. She finally tells him in the poem. She says, “You can’t because you don’t know how to speak/ If you had any feelings, you that dug/ With your own hand- how could you? - his little grave” (71-73). I can assume that when she says “If you had any feelings” that before she asked him she felt like he had no feelings toward the child they lost, almost like it did not bother him. This is where they lack a connection in their marriage, which resulted in it to fail. I can assume that their marriage has failed because they are not able to communicate. At the end of the poem, woman rejects the man trying to talk to her, and walks out of the house as he calls after her.

In this home, the couple had to bury their first son, but I believe they also buried their marriage and home. I say this because when their child was gone the couple lost the bond they used to have with each other. This could have happened because they lost part of their family. It is common for a family to lose connection because of a death. The child seemed to represent the one thing that made the family pleased. The young boy was gone, and left his parents with only sadness because all happiness was buried along with his body. Burying their child in the yard of their home also is a big deal because the married couple can not forget their child who lay beneath the ground in their yard. Coincidental, the characters in this poem can actually be called a family because they actually did not forget their lost child.

Overall, the home that this family lives in is not really a home because they are not satisfied nor comfortable. A home should have people who are happy and feel comfortable with the family in the home. A home should be where the family communicates what they feel so that there are no secrets, and they feel satisfied around each other. This home was not a home because the couple never discussed how they felt about the loss of their child until the husband notices his wife staring out the tiny window at her son’s grave. Also it is not a home because a family never leaves anyone behind or forgotten, but the couple left each other behind in their mourning for the loss. In an actual home, the family would support each other during hard times. Because family is what makes a home a home.

Works Cited

Frost, Robert. “Home Burial.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2013. 715-18. Print.

#home #relationship #RobertFrost