Letting Go

Yesterday our youngest, Mary, got in her Jeep and headed for the Windy City. She’s beginning her Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago, and we’re happy for her and proud of her and blah blah blah.

None of that changes the fact that, for a parent, letting go is hard. We’ve had to do it four times, and it doesn’t get any easier, but this time we are truly “empty nesters.” There’s a finality to this move that means we’ve taken another right turn in our lives. Of course, parents always know this day is coming, but today I experienced it.

Mary went away to college seven years ago, but her bed stayed, her closet rotated clothes as she came home and left again, and so it was not the same. The house is measurably more quiet now. When I hear an upstairs noise, I’m programmed to attach it to Mary. Except it isn’t. Roscoe, our dog, is waiting at the garage door for her to come home from work. But she isn't coming.

Today I vacuumed her room, thankful that there are a few unwanted pictures on her walls and a castoff jacket or two in her closet. She left her corner bookcase loaded with books, and one more piece of furniture that she would have taken if she wasn’t renting a 350 sq. ft. studio in Hyde Park. It’s my grandmother Momo’s chest of drawers.

My mom asked me, after Momo died in 1976, if I had any use for it. With a newborn, and hopefully more children to follow, of course I did. But I would have taken it anyway because it was Momo’s. Over the past thirty-five years it has held fabric, children’s seasonal clothes in cold Colorado, and then finally it became Mary’s own. Empty now, it stands stark against her wall. And as I vacuumed under it, I remembered the story Momo told me about it.

It was 1935, the height of the Great Depression. My grandfather had just died, and Momo had three children. She dusted off her Arizona “Lifetime Teaching Certificate” and headed for a little mining town to teach school, living in a tent because the town could not afford housing for her. From there she took any teaching job she could find, and by 1946 she could afford to buy a home in Prescott, Arizona. The war was over, her son was home safe, her daughters had finished college and were well situated, and so she bought a bedroom set, because, as she put it, "I could finally breathe again."

It’s empty now, for the first time in sixty-six years.

Just like the upstairs room.