Sending Kids to College for the First Time

We  just moved one of our twin sons to Washington University in St. Louis, one time zone away. In two weeks, we’ll help set up his brother at Stanford University, three time zones away.

I’m thrilled for our sons, nervous about the challenges ahead, and excited about the marvelous opportunities that lie before them.  Distracting myself with organizational tasks and preparations, I’ve managed to avoid being maudlin, morose, sentimental, and weepy (most of the time).

Letting Luke go was harder than I expected. The 12-hour drive to St. Louis was long and dull. By about hour 9, when it was getting dark and we discovered we had only had a few miles of gas left, I hit my low point. There was no gas station to be seen…nothing…for miles. No street lights… no exit ramp… no billboards… no road signs. Since I’d never been to St. Louis, my mind was a blank, too. In such a vast and empty landscape, the demons began leering and taunting, “He gave up Duke for this? He could have been less than 3 hours from home, and he chose this?” “Why didn’t you try to intervene?” “You spoiled, elitist, East coast snob, how could you even think such questions?”

Fortunately, I kept quiet in the back seat, we found a gas station, and soon arrived in St. Louis, where the city lights cast the demons back into the shadows. Next morning, we drove on campus, to be greeted by adorable, friendly students directing us to the dorms and offering to help tote the baggage. The campus was so lovely, each building more impressive than the next, that I found myself brimming with enthusiasm, delighted that Luke belonged there. I managed to keep up my spirits up right until the goodbyes, when I hugged him tight and croaked, “I love you,” turning aside to hide my tears. Luke sauntered off to join his orientation group, and I climbed in the car and sobbed.

Only for a few minutes. Since then I have (mostly) refused to indulge  in sadness and sentimentality. I’m not the first person to send off a child to a far away place, and I know how lucky I am, and Luke is, to be at Wash U, especially when only 4 miles away in Ferguson, MO, the Brown family will not be sending their son Michael to college, because he was shot and killed by a policeman a few days before his semester started.

But I’m no holier than thou. Truth is, I feel as if a cavern has been carved in my heart. It IS really hard to let your child go away, even to such a good place.  Today, exactly one week since we said our goodbyes, I’m sitting on the couch, aimlessly web surfing, failing to summon motivation to read, work, exercise, clean, or organize. Feeling maudlin, morose, sentimental, and weepy.

In that roundabout way I come to recognize grief, I’m realizing that I’m not just grieving the separation from Luke, but also missing my Mom. I really want to call and ask her how she managed when we left for college. I never thought about how my departure affected her. I was 18, self-centered, and preoccupied with my own new adventure. When my parents drove 9 hours round-trip to deliver me to Vermont, I didn’t recognize their effort as an act of love and generosity. It was just something they had to do—their job. Dad says Mom cried in the car on the way home, and he recalls me being pretty emotional when they left me. I don’t remember being upset. “Well, maybe you weren’t,” he concedes.

I can reconstruct memories with Dad, but now that I’m a mother, I want to hear firsthand how Mom felt. I can’t ask her because she can’t remember. If she could, she’d probably tell me what everyone else who has gone through this says: it’s hard at first, but you get used to it quickly. It’s not the message itself I want, but the act of knitting my experiences to hers, of comparing patterns.

I don’t know if talking to my Mom would make letting my sons go any easier. Probably not. What I do know is that letting my sons go is a kind of loss that taps a much bigger and harder loss, one I keep grieving and then shutting away. I live 17 hours drive from my Mom. I can’t talk to her on the phone or Skype with her anymore. I keep finding reasons to delay my next visit—good reasons, like taking our sons to college—but the truth is that I’m dreading seeing her and facing her further decline. It’s easier to practice avoidance. Until something else opens the wellsprings of grief—like taking our sons to college.

Come to think of it, in this way my life is knitted to hers, inextricably, if not in the way I would choose. The happy heartache of sending Luke and Thomas to college is entwined with the slow sorrow of losing Mom to Alzheimer’s. This rite of passage knits us together in a larger pattern, as we each adjust to new independent or assisted living conditions. The heart strings that tug and ache are physical reminders of the way I’m connected to my family. They also remind me of the song, “Oh My Heart,” from REM’s album, Collapse into Now:

Hear the song rearranged
Hear the tress, the ghosts and the buildings sing
With the wisdom to reconcile this thing

It’s sweet and it’s sad and it’s true
How it doesn’t look bitter on you

Oh my heart
Oh my heart
(oh my heart)
Oh my heart
Oh my heart
(oh my heart)

Mother and father
I stand beside you
The good of this world
Might help see me through