The Long Goodbye

The kids turn eighteen, they move out of the house, and you start saying the long good-bye. Which is to say, that you keep saying ‘goodbye’ to them, over and over, year after year. I suppose you keep saying ‘hello!’ too, but it’s the goodbye that stays in my mind. After five weeks of staying with us, our oldest granddaughter is leaving today to make her way back to her California home and then, a week later, to UC Berkeley to begin her freshman year in college.

She has done us an extraordinary favor coming to spend this time with us. When she was a baby, I used to take care of her one day or one afternoon a week, but when she turned one, her parents moved with her to the Midwest and we, eventually, moved to the Northwest. As a result, our visits with her and them have been regular but not frequent: that is, not frequent as in every week. We have watched her grow up largely from a distance, watched a bit here and a piece there, as is so common now as children not only move out, but leave for far away with the grandchildren in tow. I should be grateful, of course, that my children have at least stayed in the U.S. A friend’s three children each moved to a different continent. The difference of a time zone or two pales when you compare it with an entire continent away and even an international date line.

These five weeks have been filled with lots of activities (rock-climbing, kayaking, cooking—she learned to make ravioli and pie crust, for example), but also with lots of conversation, which is far and away the best part from my perspective. I was fearful, before she came, that she’d be expecting a kind of Disneyland vacation and, although I suppose it would be possible to provide it given the many possibilities of the Vancouver-Seattle nexus, we weren’t really planning to provide it. Fortunately, she seemed open to the possibilities of ‘meeting the grandparents.’ Ed and I do feel well met; and we think and feel that we have met her as she stands on this cusp between childhood and adulthood. Now we look forward to hearing from her as she progresses through Berkeley, even as we know that we are beginning that same long goodbye to her, as well as continuing the long goodbye to her dad.

Spending extended time with an eighteen-year-old inevitably makes you think about what it was like to be eighteen yourself. By that age, I was finishing my first year of college in Idaho, and I, too, was planning to go to UC Berkeley a year later (a goal I never reached, though). I am sure I was naïve, guileless, and unworldly, given that I had almost never left my small, Idaho hometown. And yet, looking back in my own memory, I don’t see the naivete, the guilelessness, the unwordliness that was doubtless there because I never knew about it; even in memory it has been as if varnished over with all that came later. A long goodbye to one’s self, as well, I guess. Turning eighteen looks less Janus-faced than I would have thought: not so much looking both backwards and forwards, but more a division between what went before and what will be a long process of becoming. Which serves to balance the parents' and grandparents' recognition of the beginning of that long goodbye.