Last fall, I ran into a friend of mine who had recently sent her only child off to college.
“I fell into bed for a month,” she said. “I was so depressed, I didn’t want to move.”
As I listened to her describe how the sadness began to ease after his first few visits home, I was thinking that surely I would be better prepared to let my first-born go the next year. My friend, I reasoned, must have suffered so because her nest was emptied, something I wouldn’t be facing for another decade.
The summer before Ben left for college, I kept checking in with friends who were priming for the same event. We talked about how relieved we would be not to lie awake nights until they came home, not having to wonder where they were or what they were doing. We patted each other on the back for having raised capable, independent young men. But we also imagined our sadness, acknowledging that a phase of life was over and we’d have to move on.
The day came. Pulling our minivan in front of his dorm to unload felt as if we were taking part in some ancient ritual. Ben let me make his bed, arrange the bath towels. We met the roommates, the roommates’ parents, stayed only a little longer than we probably should have, and then said goodbye, making as small a scene as six people in the hallway can.
Then I lost it. My heart, that is. I really didn’t know how to explain the tears that would well up with blinding suddenness, the ache that made my breath short, my fixation on the little bubble on my computer screen where we would sometimes instant message. I tried not to tell him too often that I missed him. I didn’t tell him that I’m incredulous that eighteen years have passed so quickly, that I don’t know how to think of him abstractly, or that I don’t know how I can be so happy for him and so terribly distraught at the same time.
I thought I had become used to his absence during his senior year of high school as the necessities of his life become less and less a part of our family routine. I got it; I applauded and supported the independence that he has been insisting on since he was a little boy. My role wasn’t changing that much: we still have two adolescents and an eight-year old at home. So what hurts so much?
Maybe it’s that letting Ben go has shed new light images etched in my mind unchanged for thirty-six years.
