Parting Is Not Sweet Sorrow

One day when I was a freshman in college, I came back to my dorm room in the early afternoon after class. I opened the door to find my roommate sitting in his desk chair turned away from his computer and toward the door, but his head down, his eyes staring at the carpet. He didn’t look up or say anything as I walked in.

“Hey, Michael,” I said finally.

“Hey,” he said without looking up.

“You okay there, man?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“You look kind of down.”

“I”m not,” he said.

“You need to talk about anything?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m just bored. And I’m making myself more bored by thinking of other times when I was bored.”

Still cracks me up today—mostly because I don’t remember specific times of being bored. Novelty is what the brain tends to remember; it tends to blur monotony into a glob, a feeling.

But as we pulled away from Grant and Katy’s apartment in Lewisburg yesterday and as I fought back the urge to cry, I pondered why it always felt so miserable to part from loved ones. And then, I made it worse by thinking of other times I had parted from loved ones. When Grant first went to college at age eighteen, we dropped him in Amherst on a blistering hot day (he transferred from UMass to Bucknell after his mission). We made sure he was set with the coaches, settled into his room, and then we started back. I pulled into a Cumberland Farms. Lauren headed for the restroom and to get fountain drinks; I popped the gas tank and pulled out my credit card. As I got ready to pump, my vision blurred with tears. When I was done pumping, I pulled the car into a parking spot and tried mightily to stop the tears. Lauren soon emerged from the store and got into the car.

“You could’ve helped,” she said.

“No, I couldn’t,” I said.

She looked at me for a couple of quiet moments. “Are you crying?”

“Nope,” I said. “That’s just water coming from my eyes.”

Then, there was Lucia and her first semester at BYU Hawaii. She was supposed to fly out on a Sunday with Lauren. We were going to spend Saturday together, go to a Revs game, eat at one of our favorite places. But a hurricane had appeared in the Atlantic headed our way. It seemed to me that it would hit south of us, but Lauren was taking no chances. On Friday afternoon, she switched the flights to Saturday morning. I objected but was overruled (and in fact, the Sunday flight went out per plan, but Lu and Lauren were already gone). I spent the next three hours crying intermittently—ostensibly over the loss of our goodbye trip. It’s now a source of family controversy and lore. Anytime Lu is home and we talk about her return date, someone says, “Well, that’s when she is scheduled to go back . . . until Mom decides to change it.” Lauren has said at times that she would like to make it up to me, and I have assured her that she can’t—there was only one chance for a final goodbye Revs game and she stole it. There can be no reparations, only an eternity of my whining.

With Lindsay, we planned a trip to Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. It was supposed to end with Lindsay being dropped off at school. Then the wrestling team moved her report date way up, and the trip almost didn’t happen. But she reached a compromise with the team where she reported halfway through our trip. So we did the Maryland portion of the trip and went tubing down the Potomac. Despite wearing a T-shirt and tons of sunscreen, I got sun poisoning (it’s a real thing—look it up). The part with Lindsay ended in our installing her in her dorm room, hugs all around, then tears, as Lauren and I walked sadly back to the car. Lindsay immediately dove into living her best life, expressing her sheer happiness at all she was doing, finding a new boyfriend, and most of all not missing her parents.

So to be clear, one daughter went literally as far away as possible while still staying in the United States, and the other partied like it was 1999 and Y2K was the end of civilization. None of that hurt at all. I’m fine. It was just water coming from my eyes.

Then there was Grant getting married last year. After their honeymoon, I got a pickup and drove out a mattress and their wedding presents to their new apartment in Pennsylvania. When that task was over, I got back in the truck and started for the freeway. There was something so final about it. He was no longer ours—he belonged to his wife Katy (whom we adore). I called Lauren and blubbered and cried for about half an hour. Actually, I didn’t. We had a pleasant conversation, while water came from my eyes.

Whenever we have visited my mother, on our departure day, she has always planned a shopping trip so she wouldn’t have to be in the quiet house immediately after, and she always wanted to hear that we had made it home safely. Hence there was always a call or text to say we had. And in this most recent case, we had left Graham with his grandmother, so we had him to go home to. Graham, as you know, is a constant delight. He was low on clean laundry, so when we ran an errand together last night, he decked himself out in sweatpants that were way too small, bordered on obscene, and that he is definitely not trying to hide in these blurry and obstructed pictures. And of course, we had the throw-down about “Ice, Ice, Baby,” and Vanilla Ice. Plus, we will see Lindsay at a wrestling meet in Connecticut and we get Lu home for the holidays the same day. So things could be worse.

Then again, someone still owes me my final home date to the Revs with Lu. I’m never getting over that. And I’m going to sit here and think non-stop about it while also remembering all the other bad things that have ever happened to me that I am not getting over. I’ll be fine, though. Carry on. What? No, that’s just water coming from my eyes.