The Last First Day of School: ‘Love Is Proved in the Letting Go’

Life is measured in mileposts, a steady progression through the rites of passage that delineate the mortal journey. When we’re young the markers of time are mostly thrilling firsts: first day of school, first kiss, graduation, first job, marriage, first home. Soon they give way to other, less welcome firsts: first broken heart, first hospital visit, first death of a loved one. As we age, the firsts are replaced by a steady accumulation of lasts. The realization dawns that each of the little rites of life and love we have performed with metronomic regularity for decades are happening now for the final time: the last trip to a favorite place, that last steep hill climb, the last visit with an old friend.

The joy of parenthood is getting to live all those firsts again through your children. The pain comes in realizing you will do the lasts again too. Suddenly the most routine things you have done for years become pregnant with existential significance as you realize you will never do it again. The finality of the act reminds you not only of your own mortality, but of the strange and awful severing that growing old represents: the shock of understanding that these creatures you have made and shaped aren’t yours after all. All you can do is send them on their way to mark off their own succession of firsts and lasts.

This somewhat maudlin rumination was prompted last month by one of those lasts for me, a mortality-reinforcing moment that the Anglo-Irish poet C. Day-Lewis (1904-72) called “the small, the scorching ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.” My fifth and youngest daughter (yes, I have five—I sometimes think I am but a character in a Jane Austen novel) embarked on her senior year in college. And so, for the 20th time her mother and I said goodbye to a fledgling uncertainly attempting flight.

I realized as we packed that this would be my last long drive from New York City to the Midwest and back, the last effort to cram what always seems like enough stuff to fill a family home into the back of a groaning vehicle, my last grumbling lecture about how when I went to college I had a suitcase and an alarm clock, the last time I would try to get my head around how many pairs of shoes a young woman needs.

It was the last chance too to sit in a car for 12 hours and talk—between the music and the podcasts—about our hopes and fears, the last chance to be reminded of what a simple joy the college years are, to wander around the branchy groves of a great university buzzing with that unique energy of young men and women in the anticipatory excitement of people about to embark on their greatest journey.

There is salt to every strawberry. There is plenty I won’t miss about this ritual. I won’t miss the daylong back- and leg-torturing drives west and east along Interstate 80, the numbingly familiar, mostly unchanging terrain. I won’t miss the stops for fast food and comfort breaks in windswept concourses of highway service plazas. I won’t miss another day driving back and forth between the storage unit and the dorm (it turns out the oversize car load was only a fraction of the vital necessities of a 22-year-old woman).

And I certainly won’t miss the tuition. My daughters have been enriched by their education and we don’t regret the investment. But I can’t suppress a wince when I mentally calculate how much more house or car or pension I could have had if I hadn’t deposited something close to a small country’s gross domestic product into the bulging coffers of a private university.

Yet of course the pain comes harder when you realize you would do it all again in a heartbeat just to have a little more time with them. You would happily drive twice the distance, eat three times the terrible food, to have another chance to defer this last time. And the real pain comes when you think back to the times when the whole parenting thing seemed too much: the sleepless nights, the tears, the teenage tantrums. Now, performing among the last of the parental duties, you would give everything to turn back the clock, knowing that all of the trouble and inconvenience of being with a young child doesn’t amount to a fraction of the pain of parting from her.

In his poem “Walking Away,” from which I quoted above, Lewis captures the cruelty and beauty of this moment. He describes how he watches his young son nervously, hesitantly leave his father’s side to take the field for his first soccer game, and he relates the awesome, sacred truth that this tiny moment of separation signified: “I have had worse partings, but none that so / Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly / Saying what God alone could perfectly show— / How selfhood begins with a walking away, / And love is proved in the letting go.”

EDITOR AT LARGE

By Gerard Baker