When they are gone we miss them, but mostly we miss the little things in daily life that we take for granted or don’t notice while they are still here. People enter and exit our lives throughout our lives leaving marks on our hearts, memories in our heads, echoes of their voices in our ears and the remnants of touch on our skin. Think of the things you would miss: the moments, the hands held, the mundane conversations over morning coffee, the songs sung in the car and the company that fills our lives.
Our parents are the first people we know who offer unconditional love and care, watch us grow to become the adult version of the people we are meant to be. They hold our hands as we learn to walk, coach us with words as we learn to speak and are there to listen as we share good news or lament the unfairness of life.
We use them for support and dare to walk off into our own adult lives knowing that the connection stays strong and tethered. When our parents age, we become the support and return the favors of our youth. We become those who listen to the stories repeated, we hold out our hands to grasp, give strength and remind them of the unconditional love we hold for them.
When our parents are gone, we remember the softness of their touch and long for more. We are grateful for recordings of their voices and the photos taken with them long ago when we were carefree children, annoyed teenagers and young adults. We cherish the cards we’ve saved (who writes cards these days?) and the mementos from trips taken together. We wear their jewelry and feel somehow connected to them again. A special shirt or sweater hangs in our closet unworn and yet we are unable to let it go. We notice the habits of theirs that we’ve unknowingly adopted and look at ourselves through the lenses of aging, knowing that we, too, are heading down that path.
Our children make an imprint on our heart and though, from the beginning they are moving away from us, the invisible umbilical cord, as I like to call it, keeps us forever connected. From the first day of daycare, a babysitter or preschool, when we entrust them to the care of another to the day they move out of our home on their way to college or to live on their own, we are ever so slowly adapting to the idea that our children came through us for their own purpose.
We have the awesome responsibility of caring for them, preparing them for a future unknown and teaching them the lessons we have learned on our journey. When they are babies, we hold them close to inhale their delicious scent. We feel the fuzzy, new hair on their heads and touch their unbelievably soft skin. We can’t quite comprehend the miracle that they are and it is almost as if we have to use all of our senses to believe it.
When our children become increasingly independent we are only able to catch their stillness as we check on them sleeping or hold them in a moment of quite rest. We watch them grow up and grow away and then we are shocked by the realization that they are gone. We miss the sound of their feet running annoyingly through the house, the noise they make during noisy sibling fights and the piles of laundry. We miss the boredom and slowness of the early days when they were babies and we thought we’d go out of our minds for the sameness of it all. We long for the sweet scent of their newly washed hair as we sat reading bedtime stories. We miss driving them to lessons, nagging them about homework and the unending school functions as we sit in quiet homes.
Partners arrive in our lives, sometimes at just the right moment, sometimes at a moment that is less than perfect. We connect, we fuse and then, somehow, we begin to travel together down the road of life. We merge lives and cohabitate, sharing meals, worries, joys, homes, feelings and families. We grow accustomed to them and in the best cases, appreciate them for all they give to our happiness, all that they share with us. In other cases, we grow apart, annoyed and sometimes hurt or disappointed. At some point, we are alone, our partner, wife or husband is gone, some through disappointing circumstances, others through illness or death.
For those of us who travel through life together for any amount of time, the sharing of a space of love, when lost, jerks us to a new reality. We miss hearing our partner breathe; even the snores at night are missed. We miss the hands that knew just how to rub our feet at the end of the day, or to hold our hand in the dark movie theater. We miss looking into someone else’s eyes for connection, for answers, for forgiveness. We miss a person who would listen to our complaints, our stories and our successes with compassion. We realize that the art prints they loved and selected for our home have become the ones we love. The music shared and the favorite restaurants aren’t regular occurrences any more, but the nuances of our daily life together as it was, are ingrained in us.
The gift of relationships in life—our parents, our children, our partners—is one that we are all given and to appreciate those gifts, before they are gone, is the gift we can give ourselves.
