I know you’re ready.
But me?
I’m restless. Shiftless. Standing still. Crying at odd times. Lying down. Getting up. Overeating. Wandering the halls. Forgetting why I came into the kitchen. Exhausted from doing nothing but feeling everything.
Whose idea was this? That I love you so completely, only to let you go?
I think of those early years — when we used to skip home after dropping your siblings off at school. I’d lift you in the air and beam, “What time is it?”
“Mama-Meals time!” we’d yell, not caring who heard us. Swinging you around, I’d be careful not to throw out my back since I was an older mother and you were big for your age and oh-so-impossible to understand sometimes with that lovable speech impediment. A therapist once suggested we correct it. I said no. I understood you perfectly.
We danced wildly in the living room when no one else was home, moving for the joy of it. Nancy Sinatra and Johnny Cash on an old speaker, and you’d flip your hair. We’d collapse in sweat and giggles on the floor. It was everything.
When you started preschool, I dropped you off and headed for the mountains. I trained hard during your youngest years. Running was my outlet, my temple, my sanity. And so maybe it makes perfect sense that now, in your final spring at home, you’ve started running once in a while, too.
It makes sense given the athlete you already are. You played four years of varsity basketball — you are a legend. You could throw the ball downcourt like a baseball, landing it in the perfect spot for your trusted point guard to catch and lay it in. You brought your father and me so much joy. Even when you were burnt out and sort of ready to be done, you never quit. Thank you for never being done before you finish.
But running! It’s hard in a lonely way. It hurts. It demands. It rewards. And you’re out there, on the trails, doing it. Bounding, burning, filling your lungs with new life and emptying them again and again. Focused. Free. Embracing the struggle uphill, and the elation on the way down. Past the cactus, through the brush, under the sinking sun. You chase the light and beat it.
You text Dad: “I went four miles.”
I watch this quietly. I don’t say much. But inside, I touch the holiness of it — of you, of running, of the strange, painful, beautiful handoff that is happening.
Because running saved me once, and then again and again. In high school, when I needed to separate myself from the popular crowd and feel something real. In the Peace Corps, when I was invisible. In Flagstaff, when silence filled my first marriage. And then, after Grandpa Jim died.
Sometimes you and Dad come home from a run and I’m here — not running, but cooking, stretching, praying. I feel that old sadness flicker: No one remembers that I used to run. I was the marathoner. The triathlete. The medal-winner.
But I pause in the hallway and let myself feel the ache. Then I watch it fill with something else as I manage, “How was it?” And I inhale you — sweaty, glowing, alive.
I want to hear everything. The route. The pain. The wind. The hill after the horseshoe. The golf-course detour. The coyote. The sunset. How you go faster when you see people coming.
Every step.
Because this isn’t even about running. It’s about me letting go and you becoming.
One day you tell me you got lost. You were out on the trails, got all turned around and didn’t like it. I shook my head to keep from saying, as if I know, that getting lost is OK and that’s how we learn to let ourselves be found.
I’m glad the words came to a stop on my lips because it’s me that needs that advice today, not you.
Today, the house is quiet. You’re not home. Dad’s working. I’m bored. Sad. A little lost. I scroll. I miss you before you’ve even left. I think about that boy who loves you now, and how it used to be just us.
Just us.
You wouldn’t remember, but Grandpa Jim adored you. He fed you Raisin Bran like you were a chubby little bird. You’d waddle away chewing, and he’d whisper, “She’s amazing.”
Sixteen years he’s been gone now. I whisper, Dad, can you help me through this one? Did it hurt this much when I left? And kept leaving? Notre Dame, Alaska, Uzbekistan? I remember your smiling, proud blue eyes saying goodbye every time.
I want to become more like you, Dad, and strengthen my faith. Try to focus. To remember that something is bigger than my terror, and more lasting than this season.
I wonder if it’s you who helps me remember this: The other kids will be home soon, and the house will fill again. Then empty again. One day, maybe there will be grandbabies. Joseph will find his footing. Sophie will bloom. Life will go on. It’s going to be OK.
And you, Amelia. You, I will watch with awe. With tears in my eyes and your grandfather’s voice in my head: She’s amazing.
You will always beat the sun.
And I want to tell you this: You lighten my load. Brighten my days. One word from you is healing.
This is why all your friends’ families love you so much — even though your feet stink. They feel something in you that can’t be named: truth.
When I went to college, I learned that the important things can’t be learned as knowledge from a book. The important things are learned in stillness. In silence. In between the lines. In between the breaths.
So, when you leave for college, run hard sometimes, and then be still and listen to the teacher within you in the silence between heartbeats. She says you will never be lost. You might think you are, but it’s not true.
And, this isn’t goodbye. God knows it’s not that. And it isn’t about me. Except, of course, it is. About us.
Kerith Mickelson teaches high school English. She loves cooking and meditating in the mornings on a mountain, where, with every exhale, she imagines the last letting-go.