oh this is hard

The world is in riotous bloom.  We are reminded at every turn of beginnings, fecundity, growth.  The days are long and warm, and summer glints on the horizon, and everywhere I look there are bare legs and smiles.  This is the height of spring: dizzy, jubilant, glorious.

But I can’t stop experiencing lasts.  In the past couple of weeks, I have attended my last Lower School spring concert, performed my last tooth fairy duties for my older child, watched our household’s last World’s Fair poster board come together.  Last, last, last.  Time is whipping by so fast I can barely breathe.

Last week, I drove by a large tent at Boston University, which I assume is for graduation, and I think of how the way that the reunions tents going up at Princeton was a visceral harbinger of the end of year.  I used to watch them putting up fences and tents with a tangible sense of loss: those wooden and canvas structures were a threshold between now and then, between the present and the future, and I was forced across it.  The peaks of white canvas tents will always spell the ending of something to me.  Even as they mark the biggest beginning of all, that of commencement.

I’ve written about commencement a lot before.  Living in a university town, this time of year, it’s impossible to avoid.  In 2013 I asked if it was just another word for what might be the “central preoccupation of my life.”  The ways that endings and beginnings are wound around each other, inextricable, enriching one another even as they seem opposed, opposite: this is one of the themes I return to again and again, there’s no question about that.

The other night, Grace lost her last tooth.  Her last baby tooth.  She’s over 13.5, so this is not a last that should surprise me, and she’s late to lose it.  But still.  Still.  I went in before bed to take the tooth and to put tooth fairy money under her pillow, and she woke up as I did so.  Her eyes popped open and she whispered, “What are you doing?”

“Just saying goodnight,” I said quickly, holding the pouch with her tooth that I’d taken from under her pillow but not yet opened down by the floor on which I was kneeling.  A slow grin spread across her face.

“You sure about that?” she asked with a sly smile.  I burst out laughing.  I know she doesn’t believe in the tooth fairy.  She hasn’t for years.  This humorous young woman makes me laugh so much.  I adore her.  Do I miss the much younger girl, the small child who slept, under whose pillow I slid the first couple of tooth fairy dollars?  Of course I do.  But I don’t want to go back: I love right now.

Kunitz’s feast of losses, which I’ve also written about ad nauseum, runs through my head at this time of year.  Grace doesn’t have any more baby teeth.  Whit doesn’t have any more spring concerts.  His class sang sang several songs, but my favorite was Seasons of Love, from Rent, which I have long loved (and have often thought about writing about!).

We will head to Princeton at the end of next week to celebrate my 20th reunion (where we will take advantage of those great fences and tents whose arrival marked the end of my undergraduate year).  It is my first reunion in my life where my grandfather won’t be there.  I didn’t know the reunion in 2011, when I walked with him, was the last.

There is so much beauty and so much loss.  There is laughter in the dark with my teenage daughter just an hour after holding her last baby tooth in my hand.  There are tears in the lower school gym as my son, now the Big Kid on the stage, dances to Soul Man and then to a song from Rent which reminds me of college.  There is aggravation that the Ecuador presentation doesn’t seem ready, and in the wake of that irritation, I feel simultaneously thankful that Jesus this is the last time and mad at myself for not fully appreciating this, the last time I’ll hear a child practice their 5th grade presentation.

Still, then tinges now, and no matter what I do, I can’t run away from the shadow of loss the haunts every single moment of this life.  The magnolias bloom but even as my head spins with their gorgeous beauty I know how transient it is, and preemptively mourn the brown puddles they’ll be on the sidewalk in a matter of days.

Teeth, concerts, presentations.  Commencement, graduation gowns, canvas tents.  My friends, my grandfather, my children.  It’s all one big, glorious swirl, this life, alleluia and farewell, loss and beginning, love and tears.  Every single day.

my sixth grade graduation, May 1986.  Sorry for the shadow and poor photo; the picture was so thoroughly glued to the page that I couldn’t take it off to scan it, and I wanted to include my father’s handwriting, because the carefully composed and annotated photo albums that he made are among my most-cherished things. 

Tomorrow, Grace graduates from sixth grade.

I remember the day that I graduated from sixth grade, in the same school, in the same building, better than I recall yesterday.

I’ll sit in the gym that I’ve picked her up from for many years, and once again, my own memories will collide with reality and I’ll fall down the telescope into that disorienting place where I am not sure what’s now and what’s then, what’s me and what’s her.  But even in this vertigo-like swirl of memory and emotion and time, something essential endures, the sturdy presence of my love for my daughter, a cord whose strength I’m trusting more and more.

I almost worry about saying that out loud, because I fear jinxing myself.  I’ve written at length (ad nauseum, even) about my fear of the distance that I know must mark these adolescent and teen years, and about what will happen to my relationship with Grace as we make our way through this time.  I know the red string that ties our hearts needs to stretch, and it will, but more and more, I’m also trusting that it will come back eventually.

We are again in the season of endings and beginnings.  Of commencement.  I feel like a broken record, but I find myself aghast, awestruck, frankly shocked by the velocity of time.  Life’s whistling past my ears ever faster, just as I was told it would.  Even as I join in the celebrations, which are bigger this year than ever, because graduation from 6th grade is a big passage at our school, I’m sorrowful in equal measure, and Stanley Kunitz’s feast of losses echoes in my head.

Last night was the sixth grade graduation party, and I was proud to watch Grace dance all night long, singing enthusiastically to everything from Journey to Katy Perry.  The moment I won’t forget was when all the parents were dancing with our sixth graders, belting out the words to I’ve Had the Time of My Life.  Once again, then and now collided, and I found myself blinking away tears.  Time is confoundingly elastic, and the past – in the song, in the memories, in the dizzying blending of then and now – felt animate, tangible, in the present.

At our sixth grade graduation, in 1986, we sang Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All, and that night I co-hosted a graduation party with some friends at a local tennis club (I went on to celebrate my engagement to Matt, my 30th birthday, my mother’s 60th birthday, and a host of other meaningful occasions in the same space).  It was a sunny and beautiful day and my conviction that the future spread in front of me, glittering, assured, was tempered substantially by my parents’ recent announcement that we were moving to London after Christmas.  I recall sitting on the sidewalk outside of the tennis club crying about the departure, though I can’t recall if that was before or after the party.  I also remember that one of our longtime babysitters DJed and that the last dance was Phil Collins’ Separate Lives, played twice.

The full photograph above, which I cropped, includes the faces of three of my closest friends from lower school.  I’m grateful to still be in touch with all three of them.  I look around at Grace’s friends and wonder who she’ll still count dear in 29 years.

While it feels like only weeks ago that I stood there, it was almost 30 years ago.  Wow.  Tomorrow I’ll go through the looking glass again, into the place where time and memory and love and loss swirl together into a heady mixture whose power can bring me to my knees.

Only one thing I can do.  Blink back my tears, look at my only daughter, my first child, and be here now.