Two weeks ago last Sunday morning as I cleaned the kitchen there
was a lone, melting chunk of Jack and Michelle’s cake left beneath the clear plastic
deli cover. Green and red flecks of icing and deep black cake crumbs were
scattered about on the counter. Micki was sleeping upstairs, as was my oldest
son, Cal, and my daughter Sally. The quiet house was mine. I gathered up the
cake box and crumbs and walked them out, across the patio and through the fence
gate to the trash with my cat Gracie following behind.
I never really know when the emotional weight of something
will hit me. It’s often not at the actual moment of change. But throwing that
cake box away felt like the ending of something I’d known and loved and the
beginning of something new and unknowable, as if as long as the cake was still
on the counter, the ending hadn’t ended. I am in the midst of a great leaving
of people I love and I’ve barely shed a tear. But the walk back from the trash
was the beginning of acceptance I guess. I sat for a moment on the patio
beneath the wisteria, scratching Gracie behind the ears with a lump in my
throat. As I cooked breakfast alone while Micki and my other two kids slept
upstairs, that solitary time helped me imagine the life that lies ahead in this
empty house.
On the previous Thursday family and a very small handful of
friends had gathered to say goodbye to Jack, my middle son. He and his
girlfriend Michelle, freshly graduated from college were heading to Denver to
start their lives. I baked bread. Jack and I smoked a pork shoulder and worked
together to get the house ready for guests. Jack’s mother brought a salad and
the cake.
It was my friend Richard’s birthday and I suspected he might
spend it alone working. He’s already an empty-nester. So I invited him to join
us. We put candles on the cake and walked it out to Richard on the patio,
singing happy birthday. He was pleasantly surprised. After he blew out the
candles, I said, “Read the inscription on your cake.”
Richard read it out loud, “Good Luck Jack & Michelle.” We
all had a good laugh.
The next morning Jack and Michelle loaded up the last of their
things. I hung around in the driveway while Jack carefully adjusted the straps
on the bike rack. And then that good-hearted boy and that sweet, dark-eyed girl
of his disappeared down the alley toward Denver.
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| Michelle & Jack at the City Market the week before they left. |
Just a week before I had stood in Sally’s bedroom doorway
with tears in my eyes. She’s my youngest. We were preparing to drive to Muncie
to move her into her freshman dorm. For Sally, too, there was uncertainty about
the future, and some tears, but we loaded up and got her moved in.
And yet a week before that departure, there had been
another. Sean, who came to live in my house when he was a teenager, had loaded
up his things and driven out west with his girlfriend to start their lives.
There had been a going away party the night before with a spirited group of
friends gathered together to send them off.
There is just one departure left. My oldest, Cal, has taken
a job teaching English in Japan. This house will cease to be his permanent address
on the 23rd of this month.
Last week Cal and I went out for drinks, then rode our bikes
to Richard’s house down the street. Back home around midnight, we each had
another gin & tonic and sat in the kitchen taking turns plugging our phones
into the stereo and playing songs we each thought the other ought to hear: the
National, Madrugada, and Japanese bands whose names I can’t pronounce. At one
point as I was leaning on the counter and searching through a playlist on the
glowing iPhone screen I turned to look at Cal. He was sitting on the bench with
a head full of gin and tears trickling down his face.
“Hey man!” What’s the matter?” I asked.
“This is the end of how things have been. We’ll all never
live like this together again.” I gave him a hug and told him I loved him.
He was right, and it’s something I’ve dreaded all summer and
so never really let myself dwell on. This summer I grumbled as I washed their
towels, bought their groceries, picked up their dirty clothes, or woke often to
find the kitchen littered with beer bottles and dirty plates. But that
grumbling was little more than whistling past the graveyard – something to
focus on to keep at bay the ache of seeing them all go away in the span of a
month at summer’s end.
The parenting guru the children’s mother and I subscribed to
when they were young often wrote, “You’re #1 job as a parent is to make them
not need you. When they go off to live their lives without your assistance,
you’ll know you’ve done your job.”
And that’s the bittersweet reality of parenting. Yet, there
should be a bigger word, one with more explosive tonnage than the delicate,
“bittersweet,” to describe the aching “thud” in your heart when they go.
And this was already a dislocated year for my family, in
this first year after the divorce. There was already an absence in the air.
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| Sharpie tattoo from the going away dinner. |
And so it is my journey, too, but what the destination will
look like, I can only imagine. I strain, searching back at what my own parents
went through when I, the youngest of 4 kids, left home once and for all. But I
was a far less attentive young man than my own children are, so can’t say I
remember much beyond my mother saying, “Your leaving was the hardest, because
you were last.”
Sally has 4 years of college ahead of her and so will come
and go on the weekends and live here in the summer I suppose. But Cal was
right. We will never again live like this under one roof. Other places will
become home for them, and this one will remain mine.
