Last Last Day
By Melanie Dale
@melanierdale
My son is graduating and leaving for college, and I can’t quit staring at the calendar as it slips by. There are AP tests and final finals, and the finality is crushing me. We have honors night and senior night and baccalaureate night and graduation night and drum-out walk and elementary school walk, and they have to wear specific shirts on specific days, going out in a blaze of glory with one final spirit week.
The last this, the last that, designed to wring every last emotion out of my desiccated, middle-aged heart. Everything is over and everything is just beginning. It’s exciting and I want to rock myself in the corner like I used to rock him to sleep.
I remember that horrible book where the mom can’t let go and sneaks into her grown son’s room at night to rock him. “As long as I’m living my baby you’ll be.” It’s creepy and weird and suddenly I understand the compulsion to put that in a kid’s book, like you’re grooming him for a future invasion of his privacy.
Don’t worry, love. Mommy’s climbing a ladder into your grown man room just like the book you loved as a child. So normal.
We have senior ads in the yearbook and we’ve combed through baby pictures for the senior slide show, which is a cruel thing to make a senior parent do, returning to the beginning, back when there was all this time. We had so much time. Some might even say too much time. I’m thinking specifically of the two-day swim meets that seemed to drag into oblivion.
It’s over and it’s starting. Childhood and adulthood. I’m so excited for him. Can’t you tell how excited I am for him with my hands clenched in fists and my eyes shining and my face gripped in a desperate smile? I’m so excited that my eyeballs are two seconds from shooting out of my skull.
I want him to embrace his freedom and the whole world stretched before him. I also want to hide in his suitcase and make sure he drinks enough water and gets enough sleep and has enough … enough … love.
I don’t sleep much right now. I work too many crosswords on my phone. I stare at walls. My son wraps his huge arms around me and I wonder how I’ll survive without his daily hugs when he’s away. He gives the best hugs. He wraps his arms around me and holds on forever.
I need to be by myself with my feelings and I need my friends to check on me. You hear that, friends? Leave me alone but also come over immediately.
At drum-out the parents line up on either side of the doors to the school, waiting for our seniors to exit for the last time. And there are drums, hence “drum-out.” We wait and make small talk with the parents around us and the Georgia sun beats down on us on the pavement. I realize after this week, I’ll probably never see most of these people again. I’ve volunteered with them and passed them at meetings and sat near them in the auditorium and in the gym and breathed chlorine with them since our kids were six years old. Goodbye forever, I guess?
I hear drums from inside the school then they burst through the doors and it’s happening. The drummers blast out, then the seniors stream through, stopping to hug parents and teachers along the way. The stoic guys come through first, eyes forward, jaws clenched, and it seems the further back in the line, the more tearful the student. It’s a parade of trembling lips and watery eyes.
I nearly lose it when the boy I carpooled to swim team for years throws his long breaststroke arms around me. How many miles in the minivan and milkshakes in the Chick-fil-A drive-thru did we take together?
A group of girls exchange flowers and squeals. Parents around me can’t believe we made it to this point, because of teetering grades, because of dwindling health, because of life with no guarantees.
Where is my son? I crane my neck to see over the crowd.
There. My heart skips a beat like he’s famous. He’s better than famous, though. He’s mine. I briefly worry that he won’t stop or he’ll pass by without seeing me, but then he’s here and we’re hugging. I don’t want to burden him with my clinginess or my need, but he doesn’t let go and I wonder if he feels the joyful heartbreak too.
And then it’s over, the last moment of the last last day of school.
My friend advises me to listen to the graduation song by myself sometime before the ceremony, to prepare. The second the notes ring out of my Spotify app, my brain disassociates from my body. I stare out the window for hours (days?) or minutes, my mind in another galaxy where this makes sense.
My son walks downstairs in full regalia and I squint because his chubby little blond boy memory is superimposed over this tall muscular brown-haired man, all tassels and cords and stoles. I can’t breathe. Is it possible to love someone so much you literally explode and die?
Throughout childhood, we practice along the way. There are preschool and kindergarten and fifth grade and eighth grade graduations and with each one we learn to say goodbye, to release a little piece of childhood, to acknowledge collectively that we can never go back.
Senior graduation is the final goodbye of childhood. All future graduations are of the adult world. This is it.
He leaves for college orientation when it’s still dark. We stand and wave as he pulls out of the driveway. The house is quiet.
He tells us later that as he neared campus, mist crested over the trees on one side of the road and sunlight poured through on the other side and it looked like it came right out of a fairy tale. He is my fairy tale, and a new dawn breaks on the rest of his life.
Before embracing her love of monsters and sneaking into the fictional world of Girl of Lore, Melanie Dale published a bunch of nonfiction books, shambled around as a zombie on TV, and survived cancer. She’s written episodes for the anthology horror television series Creepshow and over a decade of essays for Coffee + Crumbs. While she’s won no awards for literature, one time she won a Halloween costume contest and still feels pretty stoked about it. When she’s not writing, she’s teaching yoga or battling her own brain. She lives in the Atlanta area.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.