I’m getting teary-eyed at a fruit stand, running my fingers lightly over the fuzzy skin of a peach while willing my bottom lip to stop its ridiculous quiver. I will not cry. A little change of plans is nothing to be sad about, as sad things go.
A few weeks ago, I was supposed to have picked up my teenage son after a month at summer camp on a riverbank in North Carolina, the place he loves more than anywhere on earth. Next year he plans to work there all summer as a counselor, and after that he’ll be off to college with future summers unspooling toward his adult life, away from us.
So I’d been counting on the fact that when he got back this time, we’d have our final turn to do all the summer-things we’ve done as a family since he was born. We’d take our last end-of-summer road trip to visit cousins. Sleep in on our last lazy August mornings. While away our last long, hot afternoons in the quiet of the backyard. This would be our last summer in one place as a family of four, he and his younger sister together, as they’ve been all their lives.
But as my husband and I were loading the car to make the drive to retrieve him, our son called. There was a last-minute job opening. If he could stay for the rest of the summer, he would be promoted immediately from counselor in training to full-time counselor. He would have his dream job — the one he’d been working toward for years — a whole year sooner than he thought. I’ve never heard him so thrilled.
Instead of going to pick him up, we were now going to spend a handful of hours with him on his day off between sessions. During our day there we got him a haircut, fed him three meals, and took a spin through Walmart to restock his shampoo and toothpaste. I left his summer reading for school in a zip-top bag on his bunk before we drove away. No more final month of summer together. We wouldn’t see him again until two days before 11th grade started.
“It’s almost like you’re dropping him off at college,” a camp staffer joked.
“Whoa, buddy,” I said. Not yet.
Then, so quietly only I could hear it, I added, “I just thought I had more time.”
I’m a planner. I’ve been planning, for example, to feel nostalgic and weepy over the next 10 months as our daughter completes eighth grade, the final year at her childhood school before the kids scatter to various high schools. I have my waterproof mascara for all the pomp and circumstance, the baby pictures ready for slide shows. I’m prepared to help pick out a graduation dress. I was ready to handle her year of lasts. I wasn’t ready to realize one of his big lasts was already behind us.
“I thought I had more time” is the refrain of every sudden, tragic loss, but this moment I’m in is nowhere near tragic. Every day parents lose their children forever to accidents, illnesses and conflicts that use human lives as bargaining chips. People die in mass shootings on a regular basis in America now. Back when flash mobs were all the rage, I used to look around whenever I walked into a mall, wondering whether dancers disguised as shoppers might suddenly jump up on benches and start singing. Now I look for exits. Now I wonder, when my children go to movies or school or pretty much anywhere, where they would hide. A parent who has endured the horror of losing a child that way would give anything to feel this sentimental over a summer gone too soon, I know.
“I thought I had more time” — It’s pure melodrama for me to claim these words.
But aren’t they also the refrain of most foolish mistakes I make? I have said “I thought I had more time” after braking too late and hitting a curb. I’ve said it after missing a deadline, having written down the wrong date. I’ve said it hundreds of times after ruining something I’m cooking. How did the water boil away so quickly? When did the cheese toast catch fire? (The broiler never gives me enough time.)
Speaking of foolish mistakes, it occurs to me how absurd it was to think I had any control over how I’d parcel out my feelings.
It’s hitting me that I am standing at the beginning of a string of endings. I am proud and bereft at once. My children’s happiness feels like opening the best present in the world. Their leaving — a gradual process that has barely even started — already feels like my limbs are being amputated, one by one. But I don’t feel comfortable talking about such a mundane breaking-apart in a world where real wreckage lies scattered everywhere. I carry this sadness around quietly, so as not to take up too much air with it, to leave space for the far more significant sadnesses of others. How do we appropriately mourn the passage of time when it’s passing beautifully, safely, but not for everyone?
And how do we honor milestones that happened while we weren’t looking? The first toddling steps, taken at home with the sitter while we’re at work, or the first baby tooth, lost at preschool. The last time we saw someone, not knowing it was the last.
All I know to do is acknowledge the fortune of having milestones to celebrate at all. I can celebrate loving people whose accomplishments mark time in my own life. I can accept that firsts and lasts are both glorious and breathtakingly sad, especially when they sneak up on us. And I can do something — make a phone call, donate time or money, start a conversation, cast a vote, anything — every day to try to make sure fewer parents will suffer the unthinkable, that more moms and dads will bear only the most ordinary losses.
If you see me moping, gazing tearfully upon my firstborn’s favorite food, which will no longer be in season by the time I see him again, know that I’m pulling myself together. Really, I am. I’ve just slipped for just a second into my own tiny, self-indulgent grief.
And if you, too, are thinking “I thought I had more time” for any reason — a loss large or small or so eclipsed by refracted rays of joy that you’re ashamed to call it a loss at all — come cry quietly by the fruit with me.
We don’t even have to talk, unless … well, would you mind telling me to turn my oven off? It’s so easy to miss the moment when things begin to burn.
Mary Laura Philpott is the author of the memoir-in-essays “I Miss You When I Blink.”