Life Happens On Tuesdays

Never Say Goodbye

I was listening to Bon Jovi's Never Say Goodbye the other day, attempting to sing along, when suddenly I couldn't anymore.

I really tried.

The words were right there. I knew every one of them. But I couldn't get them past the lump in my throat.

For a few minutes, I wasn't here anymore. I was back in a little bedroom in West Valley City with my cousin.

We had become close after I moved to Utah when I was 7. She was two years older than me, and as we grew up, we spent a lot of time together. Weekends, sleepovers, music, boys, trouble. Especially trouble.

Her parents weren't great with finances. Sometimes blankets hung over the windows instead of curtains. Sometimes the utilities hadn't been paid and the house was freezing. I remember taking cold showers there because there wasn't any hot water.

It didn't matter. I wanted to be there because she was there. And she was so cool!

There are things you tolerate easily when you're young because the thing you have in abundance is the thing you will someday discover was most precious. Time.

We had so much of it.

At least we thought we did.

We tried drinking together. Our first cigarettes - she assured me we didn't need to worry about the health risks as they’d definitely have a cure for cancer by the time we were thirty anyway. And I nodded right along, because of course I did.

We stayed out too late. We got ourselves into situations that seemed very dramatic at the time and are hilarious now.

Once, a group of us were walking a friend home after curfew when we saw a police officer. Somebody yelled "Run!"

So naturally, we ran.

I don't even remember understanding why I was running. We weren't hardened criminals. We were teenagers out after curfew. But when someone yells "run," I suppose teenage reasoning dictates that you become a fugitive.

The police chased us.

I couldn't get into my house because there were cops in my yard, so I ran to my neighbors' house and knocked on their back door. Mr. Lucero opened it.

"Let me in. Somebody's chasing me!"

He ushered me inside and said we should call the police.

"That's who's chasing me."

Eventually the officer came into the yard and asked Mr. Lucero if he had seen any teenagers running around.

Mr. Lucero pointed at me.

So much for sanctuary.

The officer took me outside, where they eventually found my cousin hiding in our shed. She had been so scared she peed her pants.

We laughed about things like that for years.

Young. Stupid. Laughing. Certain.

That's how I remember us.

And maybe that certainty is why, somewhere in those years, we made a promise.

Our moms had cousins they had been close to when they were young. Then they grew up, got married, had families and drifted apart.

We knew about that.

And we were not going to let it happen to us.

We loved each other too much. We would stay close. We would always be part of each other's lives. We would never become like our mothers and their cousins.

We promised.

I think one of the strange things about being young is how easily you use the word never.

Never is such a small word when you haven't lived very long.

You can hold it easily in your mouth.

You don't know yet how heavy it is.

My cousin became a mother at seventeen. By nineteen, she had two kids. I was 17 myself when I moved in with her and helped take care of them while she and her husband worked.

So even adulthood didn't separate us immediately. For a little while, it looked as though we had been right.

Then I turned 18 and met the man I would eventually marry.

Nothing terrible happened between my cousin and me.

There wasn't a betrayal.

No screaming match.

No dramatic goodbye.

Life simply forked.

She was drawn toward sowing some wild oats and, I think, maybe reclaiming some of the teenage years she had lost by becoming a mother so young.

I was moving somewhere else. My faith had become deeply important to me. I wanted to settle down. I wanted marriage and babies and a steadier life.

So gradually, without either of us deciding that it should happen, we stopped sharing a life.

We talked less.

Then less.

Then almost not at all.

She doesn't even live that far away from me. That's the strange part. There isn't an ocean between us. There's not some terrible grievance to be overcome.

If she called me, I'd love to talk to her. I'd love to hear what she thinks of being a grandma. I'd love to know what her days look like now, what she's looking forward to. We used to talk about the lives we were going to have. Now we've lived so much of them, and I barely know what hers looks like.

And I have no idea when that happened.

I couldn't tell you which sleepover ended up being our final one, or which night we went out together assuming there would obviously be another time. I don't remember the conversation that came just before the spaces between conversations became years.

I don't know when we stopped being us.

Nobody told us.

Maybe that's what broke me open when I heard that song again. Because we think endings will announce themselves. We imagine there will be a moment when someone says goodbye.

But so many of the most important endings in our lives don't look like endings at all. They look like ordinary days.

✦ ✦ ✦

There was a last night my sisters and I all slept in the same bed.

When we were little, the three of us shared a queen-sized bed. I slept in the middle because I was scared, although being the oldest, I probably presented this arrangement as some sort of seniority privilege.

I also developed an excellent system for avoiding being out of bed after the light was off.

"First one to turn off the light gets to be my favorite sister!"

And my younger sisters would race to do it.

This worked beautifully until one night Michelle finally realized she was being scammed.

"I don't care. Ryenne can be your favorite sister."

The gig was up.

I remember that.

What I don't remember is our final night in that bed.

There was one. There had to be.

One night the three of us climbed in for the last time, fought over space, probably annoyed each other, went to sleep, woke up the next morning and continued on with our lives.

Nobody said, Remember this.

Nobody told us that someday we would hardly talk.

There was a last time we had to cooperate to clean our bedroom. A last argument over something stupid. A last ordinary day when my sisters knew nearly everything happening in my life because they were there.

The same thing happened with my cousin.

One summer turned out to be the end of an era. Eventually we stopped sneaking out. Somewhere there was one more night when we laughed until we couldn't breathe. One more conversation about the future in which we automatically assumed we would both be there.

And neither of us knew.

I suppose motherhood eventually taught me this lesson more painfully than anything else.

There was a last time I carried each of my children on my hip. I picked them up thousands of times. And then one day I put each of them down and never picked them up that way again.

I couldn't tell you which time it was.

At some point, each child crawled into bed with me and, without either of us knowing it, never did again.

And one day I nursed a baby for the final time in my life.

That one gets me because I didn't know my youngest would be my youngest while I was nursing her. There was no ceremony. No little voice telling me to memorize it.

I simply finished feeding my baby.

Life is full of these tiny funerals for things we didn't know were dying.

The last bedtime story. The last sleepover. The last summer when all the kids are still home. The last Christmas before someone moves away. The last time you automatically call a certain person when something significant happens.

We don't recognize these moments because human beings seem to expect endings to come with ceremonies.

Graduations
Moving trucks
Airports
Funerals
Goodbyes.

But some of the biggest endings of our lives happen on Tuesday.

Nothing announces them.

Life simply doesn't schedule another one.

✦ ✦ ✦

And I wonder if part of the reason we don't recognize them is that, when we're young, we're so busy imagining everything that still lies ahead.

I know I was.

I was artistic. I wrote, danced, acted. I imagined becoming famous someday. At 16, I developed a deep desire to know God, and some of those ambitions began moving into the background. I still needed to create, but other things began to feel more important.

I wanted a family.

I had even written about the kind of man I imagined marrying, complete with a list of attributes. Somehow, at 18, I met someone absurdly close to the person teenage me had described.

I wanted children more than almost anything. At one point I thought four sounded right. After marriage, I decided twelve sounded better.

Life negotiated six.

And then those children grew up and gave me grandchildren, which teenage me could not possibly have understood.

Some of my dreams disappeared. Some changed shape. Some came true. Some things I never thought to ask for became the best things that ever happened to me.

And some things I thought I could never lose just slipped right out of my hands.

When you're young, you think the future is mostly about gaining things.

A driver's license
Freedom
Love
Marriage
A career
A house
Children
Success

You imagine adulthood as an accumulation.

Nobody explains the subtraction.

People move. Children grow. Bodies change. Families scatter. Friendships become Christmas cards and then social media updates and sometimes not even that.

People who once knew every detail of your life eventually need the backstory and you find yourself living a future that is simultaneously more wonderful and more heartbreaking than anything you could have conceived.

✦ ✦ ✦

There is another song that has followed me across a very different stretch of my life.

When the Dixie Chicks released their version of Landslide, I was 26 years old and already had four children. I remember listening to it and feeling a sharp grief.

Back then, though, I wasn't crying for myself.

I was thinking about my mom. My grandma. The women I knew who had already raised their children and moved beyond that season of their lives.

I would listen to that song and think about what it must be like to stand where they were standing. To have already watched your babies grow up. To have lived through all those years of being needed so completely, only to come out on the other side of them.

It broke my heart.

Which is strange, really, because I hadn't lived it yet.

At 26 I was still surrounded by childhood. Four little people needed me. There were still babies to hold and beds to tuck people into and endless ordinary days stretching ahead of me.

I could anticipate the mountain changing beneath my feet, but I had no idea what it would feel like to actually look back at it.

I thought I understood. Maybe I did, as much as you can understand a place you've never been.

I listened to Landslide again recently.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I realized something that nearly undid me all over again.

I'm not the 26-year-old mom listening to that song and thinking about those women anymore.

I'm one of them.

That noisy, exhausting, beautiful country of motherhood where somebody always needed to be fed or carried or tucked in, where little bodies climbed into my bed and somebody was forever calling "Mom" is behind me now.

I'm standing where my mother and grandmother were standing when I used to ache for them.

And suddenly I understand them in a way the 26-year-old me couldn't.

The odd thing is that the song hasn't moved.

It's still right where I left it. The same voices. The same notes. The same recording.

It waited there while I raised four children, then five, then six. While babies became toddlers and toddlers became teenagers and teenagers became adults. While I became a grandmother.

While an entire life happened.

Maybe that's one of the things music does for us. We leave pieces of ourselves inside songs. Then twenty or thirty or forty years later, we return to them and discover that the music stayed still while we kept traveling.

Never Say Goodbye takes me back to a bedroom in West Valley, where two girls believed they could make promises strong enough to stop time.

Landslide takes me back to a 26-year-old mama crying for women who had already reached a place she couldn't quite picture yet.

And now I am all of them at once.

The girl who thought nothing would change.
The mother who knew everything would.
And the woman who finally understands what changing cost.

✦ ✦ ✦

But there's something else I've begun to understand a little, too.

Knowing that things end doesn't have to mean spending your life mourning them before they're gone.

It can change the way you live while they're still here.

My granddaughter sometimes sleeps over and wants to crawl into our bed.

I welcome her with both arms.

Absolutely.

Get in here.

Because Nana knows something now.

There will be a last time.

I don't know whether it will happen after a hundred more sleepovers or ten or three. I don't want to know. But I know the number isn't infinite.

So I move over.

I pull back the covers.

I make room.

I couldn't have understood this when I was a teenager. Back then, fun seemed terribly important. So did freedom and excitement and being noticed and all the things young people believe will make life feel enormous.

Now I know how enormous the small things were.

I think about that girl in West Valley sometimes.

She's sitting in a cold bedroom with blankets over the windows, listening to music with her cousin. She thinks 50 is old. She thinks she knows what matters. She thinks she knows who will still be there.

She thinks she has forever.

And somewhere else inside me, there's a 26-year-old mom with four little kids, listening to Landslide and crying for her mother and grandmother.

She doesn't comprehend that someday she will hear the same song from the other side.

I don't want to tell either of them what's coming.

I want to sit beside them.

I want to listen to the songs again.

I want to look around that cold little bedroom and understand that I'm standing inside something I will someday ache to touch again.

I want to hug my cousin a little longer. I want to crawl back into that crowded bed with my sisters. I want to memorize the weight of every child I ever carried.

To be clear, I do not want to go backward.

Absolutely not.

You couldn't pay me enough to relive my teenage years. There is no amount of money that would convince me to climb back into that particular vortex.

Now, if I could go back with everything I know now, we could negotiate.

But that's different.

I don't want my old life back.

I love the life that came after it. The husband teenage me somehow managed to describe before she met him. The six children who made my world weightier. The grandchildren I didn't yet dream about.

I don't regret the years that brought me here.

I just wish I could visit some of them for an hour.

I don't want to change or warn myself out of anything. Just to be there again, with the understanding I have now.

I think that's what I would want to tell that girl, if I could tell her anything.

Not that her promises won't last forever.

Or that someday she'll lose touch with people she can't envision living without.

Not even that she'll grow older and become one of the women she once thought were infinitely far ahead of her.

I'd tell her that she doesn't have to make the moment last forever for it to matter.

I'd tell her to stay in that bedroom a little longer.
Let her sisters crowd her.
Hold the baby.
Answer the phone.
Go to the sleepover.
Pull back the covers.
Say I love you.
Pay attention.

Because someday, without warning, she'll do something for the last time.

And years later a song will come on that she hasn't heard quite this way before.

She'll open her mouth to sing.

And she won't be able to.

Because she'll understand every word.

❦