While You’re Here

Live long enough, and you’ll say goodbye to people.

I grew up in Utica and lived in New York State for the first twenty-four years of my life. I’ve since lived in Maryland, Oregon, North Carolina, and Georgia. I’ve moved less than some, more than I necessarily expected to earlier in life, but I expect if I’d stuck around longer in one place, I still would have seen people around me go, and wound up with a similar number of goodbyes as I’ve had.

In college, I got invested in my college newspaper. More than an activity or a job, it was my world--the center of my social life at school, and I probably spent more waking hours in the newspaper office than I did any room where I’d lived those four years. It was tradition to go out to dinner after our weekly meetings, and I remember the end of one of those last meetings, as goodbyes loomed too large to ignore they were coming.

A group of my friends from back home made a surprise visit.

It was a strange moment, because I was happy to see my closest friends--the guys I’d travel with and travel to visit for years to follow, who’d wind up being the groomsmen at my wedding. But at the same time, I was conscious that in their visit, and spending the night with them, rather than my newspaper friends, I was foregoing one of my last opportunities to spend time with the latter group, and particularly so all together at that time in our lives, in that place.

I got to thinking about that sense of feeling torn, well over a decade later, and how arbitrary it is. After all, now I pine for spending time with my guys from Utica. I suppose it comes down to understanding that I’d see those guys no matter what. They were like family, and though we didn’t live in the same place anymore, either, we would have holidays and vacations and special occasions. I didn’t have to appreciate them while they were there, because they’d never be far--at least not in a temporal sense.

And now I look at our weddings as something like a farewell tour. There was the one in 2011, but all the more so the two in 2015, mine bringing up the rear in 2016. In the moment, these times felt less like goodbyes than culminations--in television parlance, less like series finales than special episodes.

But then, I suppose the biggest goodbyes are like that, not in someone disappearing all at once and forever, but rather by degrees of visiting a little less or going from phone calls to the very occasional email to no contact at all between birthday greetings on Facebook.

I think of my Grandma Jean. She was my favorite figure from childhood, and I can remember Sunday afternoon visits to play board games with her and my sister as the good old days in the purest sense. Grandma grew older and more tired before giving way little by little to dementia, until I wasn’t sure she recognized me when I visited her at the nursing home. Until she didn’t entirely wake up when I came to see her. Until she passed away.

It was the first loss I’d had of someone who was a regular and truly dear part of my life, and my first encounter with the very specific kind of regret that comes with wishing you’d spent more time and paid more attention and had more appreciation for someone before she was gone.

I wish she were still around to know my son.

It’s foolish to wish for Grandma Jean, who made it to ninety years old, to have instead made it past a hundred instead, and Riley’s lucky to have two great-grandparents still around. But as I reflect on people past--gone not only to death, but to moving away (whether they or I headed off), or simple changes to the times in our lives, I recognize that my relationship with Riley, too, will change.

There are those times, I’m ashamed to admit, when I resent him or, more to the point, the responsibilities that he entails. It’s a paradox, to love someone more than I’ve ever loved anyone else, but to still lament the loss of time to write or read or exercise or watch a movie. And then there’s the advice I receive time and again about treasuring what time I have, because before I know it, he won’t want to cuddle, and his feet will stink, and he’ll prefer time spent with friends to time spent with me, and he’ll be off to college.

It’s a paradox. But then, if we lived every moment with each other as if we knew we’d miss each other later--not so much in appreciation as fear and premature sorrow for something that isn’t yet lost--well, that’s not really a way to live, either.

So, I hold him close and I set him down. I sing to and coo at and laugh with him, and I also feel grateful when he goes down for a nap. In this way, I live a life with him, while he’s here.