I think about moving.

Memories of a glorious fall in upstate New York, a slight crispness to the air. It is still too soon for the freshman to swarm the quad, but we are here early today because our son plays soccer.

We spend the afternoon unpacking his clothes, making his bed, arranging his few, carefully chosen items from home. His roommate has yet to surface, so tonight Lewis will be all alone in the big, Soviet bloc style dormitory. There is not a single soul in sight. Is there even a security person on campus?

My husband and I drive back to the hotel and lie in bed and picture our son doing the same just across town.

It is moving day.

He is moving into a new home. Smaller, more intimate and more his than any other place he’s lived, in a funny way.

It is a place he will call his own, and a place he will fill up with a new version of himself, one that has very little to do with Mom and Dad.

And now, years later, I think about another moving day. My father, after living independently, has decided, at 85, to downsize. This week I will drive up to West Virginia to help him.

He too, will take very few belongings with him. A few pieces of essential furniture, books, clothing, toiletries and linens but not much else, really.

His immediate life will be much smaller. And like my son, he will have an opportunity to re-create the space, the decor, even the shadings of who he will be, in the years ahead.

My son, my father. The rites of passage. The stepping stones across the river to another shore.

Both days so full of nerves and excitement and newness – I will be tired, and emotionally spent. And there is this feeling of uneasiness that I won’t be able to shake. What happens next?

Life is always about letting go. And even with practice, it never gets any easier. There is no guarantee that what you lose will ever come back to you. It usually doesn’t.

As a mother, my son leaving home felt like a tearing away of something in my chest. An ache, a soreness, that would come and go. I thought it would never heal. I spent the rest of that fall nursing the hurt, probing the source, confused at the severity. Humbled by grief.

Of course, our son did return home, but it was a bit like the cicada who shucks the protective exoskeleton and crawls out with fresh features. He was reconfigured in an awesome new way. Bits and pieces of who he is now were formed in those 4 years of college.

Often I wonder at the fact that maybe it is not time, but place, that molds us.

Often I wonder at the fact that maybe it is not time, but place, that molds us.

A seed pod, a shell, a womb, a hospital room, a prison cell, a trailer, a garden plot, a starter home. We take on the shape of our surroundings.

Anyway, my father will leave the home that my mother spent so much energy and joy crafting and tending. Where she lived and died. Only now it’s so apparent that the decor was really all her taste, not his. So what my dad leaves behind now is more of her and less of himself, I think.

And like the hermit crab, he will carry away what is his. His home is his own body, really.

His new apartment is lovely. It is small, but has an extra room for an office where he will be able to write. Maybe having a smaller space will allow for less distraction, more focus. I think he will expand and fill these corners.

And my dad will be a different man, because spaces change us. And I will think of him, from my own home in North Carolina, with the knowledge that the next space he inhabits after this one will be beyond walls.

And I think that’s why this letting go is such a painful deal. Ultimately, we can’t follow. We can only help with the transition and desperately wish for a postcard that will never come.

So going back to that night in Ithaca, once my husband and I had held onto each other and sobbed and finally settled into bed, my phone lit up on the pillow with a text. It was from Lewis and it said: You both did a great job.

To this day I choose to think he was thanking us for all of it, the rearing and the nudging forward.

But I know that that’s the other part of this loss: I believe we want to love with all our hearts, to love so hard that it hurts, like it will break us. Because to let go when we would rather cling is the hardest thing of all.

So traumatic that, in the end, we want to be told that we have done a good job helping to transport the burden when it was needed. And we want to make sure someone will do the same for us.

So thank you son, and thank you Dad. I am grateful to have shared a part in your moving days.