My Sentimental Values
Letting go, even when we're not okay with it.
Happy Thanksgiving! I’m currently upstate, sitting at the kitchen table in some knitted sweats wrapping up my weekly work duties as I prep for my time in the kitchen (I’m making a chai tiramisu ICYWW). I just wanted to pay a quick little thank you for reading, commenting, subscribing, and just hanging out here. I won’t get mushy, but this newsletter is an ever-evolving mish-mash of feelings and shopping (it shouldn’t make sense, but it does to me!). The through-line is that I’m always in conversation with all of you, and feeling that connection is what gets me excited to keep this thing going. Truly every comment from you is still a thrill.
Now, onto what’s been sticky in my brain this week: movie edition.
Last weekend after having seen the new Joachim Trier film Sentimental Value, I stepped onto the rainy streets of New York and I started to cry. The best art is the kind that in its specificity hits on some universal truth. As I walked out of BAM, it wasn’t exactly the movie itself that had emotionally thwacked me, but the way I saw little shards of my own life reflected in it.
More specifically, despite plenty of superb acting throughout, the character that struck me was in fact, the house—a multi-generational home—that served as the emotional star (or maybe black hole) the entire family found itself orbiting. Though the movie’s main focus is the weight of familial relationships, the home carries its own set of secret memories and generational traumas.
My family is in the midst of letting go of a home—one that’s been our little escape for over one hundred years. A home who has fed us with pears from the orchards, whose grasses have grasped at my grandma’s ashes, which we softly spread in the meadow. It was my escape during covid, it was a witness to scraped knees, weddings, of great adventures, and when it almost burned to the ground, deep sorrows. It’s the place that keeps me connected to the family that has now passed on.
I can’t put into words how deeply heartbroken I am to lose a place that in a way has found its own personhood. How do you reckon with the loss of something that holds the heavy weight of multi-generational memories? Something as simple as taking photos feels like a bandaid-on-a-bullet-hole kind of solution, but for now, that’s the best way I’ve come up with to prep for the end. That, and making the most of the time I have left there.
Part of getting older, at least for me, has been learning to lean into grief instead of trying to avoid it. A little cry is much more cathartic than wishing that gloomy little feeling in the pit of my stomach will at some point go away. I know the holidays are a time when for many of us, that loss—of people, of places, of old lives—feels particularly poignant, so to all of you struggling with your own losses, here’s a through-the-computer squeeze. I’m so sorry.
In the film **spoiler alert** the home is sold (and even worse, gutted!!!) and the family moves forward with a delicate attempt at understanding each other anew. It’s a fresh start. My own little patch of land’s future has yet to be decided, but as I prepare myself for the inevitable letting go, seeing another family survive the same experience was both depressing and kind of freeing. There isn’t one simple solution to moving on, I don’t know that I ever will. But, I move forward, even when I want to throw myself onto the ground and refuse.
Sentimental Value was such an incredible film
I loved Sentimental Value too.
I’m sorry for your loss of your family’s home! That is very hard. I still haven’t fully recovered with going home for the holidays to my parents apartment in a new city, rather than the home I grew up in. But that’s life…??