My oldest leaves for college this month, and I’ve already started grieving her departure. It taught me something about the bigger picture of losing someone.
She’s asleep down the hall, and soon she’ll be gone. Eighteen years under my roof and my oldest daughter leaves for college this month; the last weeks are upon us, and soon the last days. This should be exciting, or I should even be jealous for the experience she’s about to have soft-launching into the world.
But instead for some reason I’m mourning someone who isn’t even gone. Why am I doing this?
Grieving someone who’s still here seems like a malfunction. But the more I think about it, it’s the only grief that shows up while we can still do something about it.
Anticipating the End
But this, this pre-mourning is something different. And it seems uniquely human. I see the future, I feel the weight of a loss in September, and it’s only August.
When my mother in law passed suddenly and without warning last year, that grief made sense. There is nothing more natural than feeling an absence, the hole in my wife’s heart that can’t be filled with anything else.
Dogs grieve us when we leave for a day, or when we die. They don’t when we’re scratching their ears. When the suitcase comes out they don’t lie awake dreading the next day. But not us.
Grief after a loss is pain from a love lost. But grief before loss is more complicated. It takes both something we love, and a mind anticipating it leaving.
It means that if we have foresight, pre-mourning is the cost of loving something.
It’s the math of The Tail End, pulling forward something that hasn’t happened yet but I know is impending. When I say goodbye to my daughter on the final day of August, that marks the end of over 90% of the in-person time I will ever spend with her. She will laugh, hurt, love, get her heart broken, have children, and maybe find out who she is, and our time together will be fleeting, choppy. I will have but glimpses, I will never really know it. My parents experienced this with me in September 1988, and now it’s my turn.
The Fixes Are a Trap
One choice we have is a “live in the moment” self-help bumper sticker. Whether it’s the cheap version (day drinking and another episode of Real Housewives of Timbuktu) or the superficially deep one (empty your mind, with just a tinge of Eastern mysticism), it’s just dumbing or numbing ourselves. Live for now, disconnect from the feeling of impending loss, and (just maybe) we can banish mourning in advance.
Both are just ways to feel it less.
The empty-your-mind club will tell you meditation is the way. I’ve tried it on and off for years, and I still don’t get it. “Emptying my mind” ends up being thirty minutes frustration trying not to think about the things I’m thinking about. At the end, no closer to living in the moment.
Exercise: Don’t think about a pink flying elephant.
There, I just made you think of a pink flying elephant.
I’m starting to believe that this is an opportunity lost. Feeling it less means throwing away the one advantage foresight gives us.
Awareness, Not Escape
The reframe that’s helping is to not empty my mind. To not deny the impending absence of my daughter, or that of any of the loved ones around me.
A number of years ago I was introduced to the Japanese concept of mono no aware. It’s an appreciation of impermanence, the feeling of sadness we get knowing that something will end. I think of it kind of like the mirror-image of nostalgia.
So I try to appreciate the taste of the loss to come, as the feeling itself appears. The closest analogy I find – when we drink wine we feel the dopamine hit from the alcohol, but we can do more. We can appreciate the subtlety of tastes, even in the midst of the gentle slide towards intoxication.
The verb here would be to “understand.” To try to understand the feeling itself, not the loss. Embracing the texture of loss instead of being hit by it. The taste, not the cortisol.
And that’s what I have here. My daughter goes away, loved ones will die, I know these things. I can choose to have an internal funeral every day until then, or try to understand the feeling. And even now, as a novice in this, I see the delamination of feeling from reaction.
The Choice We Really Have
There are 43,782 minutes until I drop her off at college (less, by the time you read this). The obvious move is to hoard them, cancel everything, spend every last one with her.
But I can’t, and I wouldn’t want to. We’d probably kill each other by week two. And every minute aimed at her is one stolen from my wife, my other daughter, my parents, my brother, my friends – each of whom I’ll also, one day, run out of time with.
“There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.”
– Thomas Sowell
So the grief was never really about a shortage of hours, or time running out. There is no number that would have been enough. I could have had all eighteen years twice over and still felt robbed on the final day of August.
Which means more time isn’t the answer to pre-grief. And neither is wishing I were the dog, or numbing myself in an altered state, chemical or meditative.
This isn’t the first time she’s left me. I lost the toddler years ago, the little girl who raised butterflies after her, then the girl who wanted a ride to school in daddy’s cool car. I just called those losses raising her. September isn’t the ending, it’s one ending.
And once the grief rattles loose from the date, it loses the dread. What’s left is an appreciation for the connection that we have, and that we had. The wine, not the cortisol.
And it isn’t only her. Everyone I love is leaving right now, in one way or another. At least this one has a date.
