Letting Go

Letting go. Those two words again.

Our daughter. Only child. College. 2,000 miles away. At times this transition feels really huge. When I think there’s no more withdrawal, I’ll hear a song on the radio, or I’ll walk by her room, or catch her beautiful face smiling at me from a photo on the wall, and there’s the ache again. A wave that always catches me off guard.

I remember someone mentioning a poem by Mary Oliver about letting go. So I googled and found it online. It helps smooth some of the rough edges of our human condition. I put the last part in bold not for emphasis, but to steady me… to help me re-member.

In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver

Look the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
that your own life depends on it;
and when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.”

–From American Primitive, by Mary Oliver