In my mom and dad’s life together, they haven’t moved much in their 61 years of marriage. When I was 5 months old in 1963, they moved into their first purchased home in St. Paul. That would remain our main home, even though in 1969, they purchased land in northern MN on a lake to establish as the family cabin. They would eventually take down the cabin and build a new house to move into for retirement on the same land they owned since 1969. So, in 1996, they retired and sold their home in St. Paul and moved permanently to Emily, MN to their lake home. Now, though they are keeping the lake home as a cabin, they are about to move again, this time to an independent living apartment in Woodbury, near where my sisters live. They aren’t having an easy time of it.
With my dad almost 90, and mom 82, they just can’t keep up with all the work necessary at the lake home. And as they have had health challenges, since I moved here to Duluth, they haven’t had anyone living near by that could help them, like my two sisters. They have entered a process of letting go that has been at best, touch and go. My mom is ready to move on, my dad, not so much. They are both focused on what they are losing, and not what they might be gaining.
Letting go. The process whereby we say goodbye to something or someone. It is a necessary skill to learn if we want to be able to navigate the stormy waters of life. I know my parents do not let go very easily of the places they have called home, and all the attendant activities that went with them. When they moved away permanently to Emily, my parents lost daily contact with their relatives and friends. They had to let go of a larger house, a parish, even my mom’s beloved perennial flowers. But they were also focused on something better: a quiet life on a lake they loved, near neighbors they had befriended. The difficulty of letting go can be mitigated by the promise of something better coming along.
But what about those times we can’t see anything better? What if we lose that which we knew, but we aren’t promised something else in return? How about when a spouse dies? People aren’t waiting for someone better to come along. They are simply trying to learn how to live without their beloved. Letting go is a skill we all need to learn, and to practice, in little things, so that we can do it when the big things come along that we have to give up, till one day we even let go of our life breath.
In Christ & Mary Immaculate,
Fr. Tony