It’s Friday. A week from today we’ll be taking Quinn to his freshman year at the University of Iowa. The mere thought makes my eyes ache.
I’m halfway through the dinner dishes when an old Marc Cohn song comes on. He sings,
“I don’t know why you chose us. Were you watching from above? Is there someone there that knows us, said we’d give you all our love?”
Aching becomes crying.
It’s true. We have given him all our love.
And it’s hard to give all your love to something, and then just let it go.
On Saturday, Quinn sleeps in late and has a full day of work. We barely see him. It feels like a rehearsal for when he’s gone.
My wife and I go on a long bike ride. I play nine holes with my daughter. The three of us dine out and enjoy a drone show downtown. It’s a good reminder: life without him will be lovely, too.
I end the night with a walk around our property and come across the ashy remains of a fire pit. Two nights earlier, he and his friends got together for a final round of S’mores before they start dispersing into the next chapter of their lives. The arrangement of the chairs suggests they clustered tightly together for some reason, probably to avoid the smoke, but maybe just to be as close as they could, one last time.
It’s the emptiness of the chairs that brings forth the tears once again. Life will indeed be lovely after he’s gone. It will also be emptier.
Those two truths can coexist.
I’m on another bike ride. Solo this time. On this back country road, I rarely see a car, but I can hear one approaching from behind. When it passes, the license plate takes my breath away: IHWKEYE
Iowa Hawkeye.
Frederick Buechner writes, “What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God? I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both.”
Me, too. It feels like God putting his arm around me, reassuring me that Quinn will be okay. That I’ll be okay.
That we’ll all be okay.
I walk into our game room and burst into tears.
This one sneaks up on me, but I do my part and let it come forth completely. It’s not until the tears have ebbed and I’ve caught my breath that I understand what it was about.
The game room. The soccer field. Watching him play. Many years ago, I adopted a ritual with him. Right before any game, I’d say, “I can’t wait to watch you play.” Then, after every game, the first thing I’d say was, “I loved watching you play.”
The sorrow is simpler than I thought: When he’s off at college, we won’t get to watch him “play.” From now on, his life will mostly happen out of our sight. We human beings are here to bear witness to each other.
I will simply miss bearing witness to him.
For some reason, I choose this moment to watch some old home movies for the first time. In the silent, grainy, jittery images, my grandparents are younger than I am now. They have the whole second half of their lives ahead of them.
Grief isn’t selective—once you start grieving, all the ungrieved things may come out. For instance, the tears I never shed at the twilight of my own childhood. How a heart attack took my grandfather before I could say goodbye. The way the cat got my tongue as my grandmother wasted away from lymphoma. How quickly the second half of my own life will come and go.
The passage of one precious thing after another.
The atomic weight of sadness is tremendous. We carry it around in our bodies, and it can very nearly crush us. But then a hard thing happens, and it invites you, finally, to feel all the hard things you haven’t let yourself feel. This departure, an opportunity to feel every departure.
Grief becoming grace.
We’re rewatching season three of Ted Lasso in preparation for season four.
In one of its final scenes, Rebecca catches Ted at the airport, as he’s departing England for the United States, with no plans to return. Grief runs down her face as she searches for the right words to sum up their time together. Finally, she speaks just two.
“Thank you.”
That’s it. That’s why this week has been so deeply bittersweet: Grief and gratitude can sit so close together they become indistinguishable.
I’m just so, so grateful we’ve gotten to be his mom and dad.
A part of you wonders if a week of pre-grieving is just a bunch of melodrama—just a lot of melancholy disguised as emotional intelligence.
But the part of you that’s been wondering what you’ll say to your son when you part ways in Iowa City is thankful for the grief, because, it turns out, grieving in advance shows you what you want to say in the end:
Dear Quinn,
It’s hard to give all your love to something and then let it go. But you’re going to be okay and we’re going to be okay. We loved watching you play, and we will miss bearing witness to your life. Thank you so much for eighteen years we’d happily do over and over again.
Love,
Mom & Dad
Our family’s favorite band—Judah & The Lion—drops a new album the day Quinn moves out. On my first listen, one line jumps out:
“Can you learn to enjoy the ride?”
As we pull out of the driveway, something within me starts to smile. Can I learn to enjoy the ride?
Yes. Yes, I can.
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