Reading · Jeff’s Substack

Tonight, Phoebe, my eldest daughter, is sleeping at home for the very last time. I don’t want to be maudlin about it, but she is flying the coop and absconding to college in Paris after 18 years beneath my roof. Of course, she’ll return home for Christmas but I don’t know if things will ever really be the same and I can tell that she doesn’t either.

We’re making dinner together like we have a thousand times before both wondering why exactly this magical chapter in our lives must round to an end.

We question why she must face modernity’s arbitrary rites of passage. She could buck the trend. We could move to a little house on a prairie and make jam and honey. We woolgather for a while, volleying madcap business ideas, laughing, delaying the inevitable.

We both know that tomorrow she will reticently, but without question, board that airplane and enter the next phase of her life. I will, too.

After eighteen years of reading bedtime fairy tales, shuttling to soccer games and dentist appointments and weeping at graduation ceremonies, Schuyler and I poise ourselves for goodbye. Phoebe – all five feet, ten inches of her – is moving six thousand miles away.

This last month of protracted liminality has felt like a type of hospice. I remember when my grandmother had but a week to live. Voices became hushed and a gentleness softly blanketed every interaction. It’s like that now. Phoebe’s old life is passing away and she is letting go of the things she loves. She is letting go of her stalwart and tender boyfriend, Nicky. She is letting go of her thick-and-thin bestie, Quinn. She is letting go of her beloved sisters, Ondine and Micah. She is letting go of her parents, her home, her room, her rituals. It’s hard. This very minute as I scrawl these words, I hear her whimper through a stiff upper lip in her room as she packs.

Catch Up On The Series

I am coaching her the best I can, scribbling down Buddhist maxims and leaving them on her nightstand. Non-attachment is nuanced. While it’s never healthy to anchor one’s happiness in the possession of things, equanimity should never be confused with apathy. To be numb to life is a defense mechanism. To grieve is to love.

T. S. Eliot wrote, “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” Indeed, there can be no beginning without an end. They define each other. Such is the yin yang of life and death, of construction and destruction. There is beauty in a life that is always falling apart, for that is nature’s course. She promises a spring with every winter.

I remind Phoebe of springtime’s first warm day – the exhilaration of it, the hopefulness of it. She stands on the precipice of a great adventure, of a warm April morning.

Her mind knows that the big and beautiful awaits behind the blind corner. Her heart follows suspiciously behind – not clinging but savoring the fleeting nectar of the full fridge, the crowded dinner table, the soft stained pillow cases – everything that makes a home safe and loving.

As I help her through this period, I feel like a psychiatrist with my own dementia because I, too, must let go. And it’s wretched. Perhaps I am confronting my own mortality as my progeny leave home. But, really, I just absolutely love having Phoebe here with me. I love when she poaches eggs. I love when she reads her loquacious essays aloud. I love when she massages my tennis elbow just so. I love when she lopes lazily around the house.

On the weekends, she can be patently Taoist. She does nothing and leaves nothing undone. I hover outside her room, not eavesdropping, just checking on her, reconfirming my utility. But I know it’s time. My work is done.

Nirvana literally translates as “blowing out.” It means exhaling. At a grandiose level, nirvana is letting go of the feeling that you are a separate self. On a quotidian basis, we practice by setting small things free. We surrender to a red light. We write off an unpaid loan. We forgive those who have trespassed against us. We release the floating paper lanterns of our hopes and desires. We move on.

As I viscerally witnessed eighteen years ago, breath is life. But if you hold your breath, you lose it. If you don’t cling to it, it comes back. I pray the same is true for daughters.

Letting Go

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