One Last Hug

One last hug.
Okay, another.
And maybe one more.

Even though we knew the ultimate number of squeezes was finite, my eldest daughter Eva was fluttering amidst the tears and suitcases, from me to her sister to her boyfriend and back again, as my wife waited nearby, misty-eyed herself, on the departure level at the San Francisco airport.

Finally it was time to pull away, literally if not emotionally. Three of us drove back to the homes and lives we already occupied, and Eva headed east for her new adventure: her first year at college.

As this day approached, I found myself marveling at how singular this rite of passage has become. For most of human history, there was nothing quite like it. Leaving home at 18 was perhaps common, although as a father of daughters I would probably have been worrying more about a dowry than tuition. But this notion of a defined transition from childhood to adulthood, an interregnum of education and personal growth spent far away from home, is a very recent development.

Eva is an avid communicator, so I expect texts and FaceTimes to be frequent even as I encourage her to be present in her new space. That constant connectedness is another difference from when I went to college, though we did have computer labs and the newfangled environs of e-mail.

This notion that distance no longer determines whether we can see or hear one another has me thinking about the journeys my ancestors took, fleeing pogroms and heading for the promise of a beckoning new world. It was a time when leaving home likely meant saying goodbye forever, especially if all you could afford was a one-way ticket in steerage on a steamship across the Atlantic.

But most of what I have been thinking about these last few weeks belongs to every culture and every literature, feelings so common that even expressing them can feel trite. Where did the years go? How did she grow up so quickly? I remember strollers, princess dresses, and ballet classes. And I remember holding both of my daughters in my arms and on my shoulders, gripping their little ankles as we surveyed the world together.

I don’t know the last time I did that. I wasn’t aware enough to mark the moment as meaningful. But how I would love to relive it once more.

I do remember vividly holding Eva one night when she was a little over a year old and warm with fever. I was trying to soothe her when she began to shake and foam at the mouth. Her eyes rolled back in her head, her lips turned blue, and she became completely limp. I remember calling 911 and screaming for help from the landing in our little apartment building. But no one opened the door. My wife was out, and I remember trembling with the belief that I was holding my dead child. It was the worst moment of my life until the paramedics arrived.

“Oh,” they said with complete calm. “It’s a febrile seizure.” I now know this condition is a generally harmless reaction to a rapidly rising fever that affects between 2 and 5 percent of young children. It’s just scary as hell. Paramedics apparently see them all the time, summoned by terrified parents who think they are holding a dead child. We learned later from my in-laws that my wife had had them when she was a baby as well.

As a parent, you do your best to protect your children, but there is no way of knowing what will ultimately prove harmful or even helpful. You weigh risks you don’t truly understand, follow a playbook you are constantly rewriting, and hope you are giving them what they need to make it safely from one milestone to the next.

And you realize, as these moments hit, that you are powerless to control time, just as every parent before you has had to realize. But if you are lucky, and here I consider myself very fortunate, you also discover that each new stage carries joys of its own, even if talking about college courses is very different from holding a little hand on a carousel.

I know Eva is ready to grab this opportunity, that she is empathetic, curious, and determined to help rebuild our broken world. The tears that have blurred my vision do not obscure what I know. I am not sad about where she is headed. I just wish life gave us more chances to stop and savor its beauty, and the people we love who make it all more beautiful.

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