Edit 38: The ‘Almost’
It’s one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. From upstairs comes the quiet murmur of my son as he practices his Japanese. It’s 6 PM on a Friday evening, and he and his father are laughing in the kitchen together, picking on one another in the easy, playful way that they do while preparing food for those in need. It’s a Monday car ride home and tugging on the quarter-zip he wears with his school uniform, he shares a story from class that makes him grin, then laugh as he reveals his honest feelings about it. Each moment is a snapshot—another one logged into my mental hard drive, a storehouse of memories for, well, several decades now. These are the moments I keep catching myself collecting.
There’s a word for the moment before though: not the ending, not the beginning, but the suspended place between them where everything still is, yet everything is already changing. I’ve been living in that word for months now. It’s called almost.
My son is almost done with high school. Almost ready. Almost gone.
He’s not gone, of course—gone isn’t the right word. He’s moving toward something: New York. College. A life that will be more his than mine, and that’s as it should be. But from where I’m standing, in the kitchen, at the bottom of the stairs, in the ordinary geography of this house we’ve shared—it feels like a threshold I can see but haven’t crossed yet. And I’m not sure I’m supposed to cross it. I think I’m supposed to stand here for as long as this lasts.
What I keep returning to are the small things. The particular angle of light at his desk when he’s working late. Looking over the back of the sofa to watch him work his way around the kitchen. The low murmur of a call with bursts of laughter with friends drifting through the wall—laughter I’m not part of, and don’t need to be. The way classical music, or sometimes jazz, finds its way downstairs when he’s drawing or writing, and I stop whatever I’m doing just to listen. Not to him, exactly, but to the life happening just above me. These are not grand moments. They’re Saturday. They’re Tuesday. They’re ordinary. And I know—I feel it with something deeper than thought—that they are irreplaceable.
Grief and anticipation have been mixing together lately, less like separate visitors and more like weather. I’ll feel the ache of it mid-conversation, mid-errand, mid-sentence. A sudden awareness that this version of things is finite. And then, just as quickly, something that resembles pride, hope, or both—this brightness about who he is becoming, who he already is. The two feelings don’t resolve into each other. They just... coexist. And it’s simultaneously uncomfortable—but honest.
I used to think the brave thing was to look ahead and prepare—to begin the letting go early, like a rehearsal. But I’ve come to believe the braver thing—and it’s the harder thing—is to stay. To resist the pull toward what’s next and remain inside what’s now. To let Saturday be Saturday, and Tuesday be Tuesday. To hear the music and not immediately turn it into a memory.
The ‘Almost’ keeps asking me to look ahead. Every college email, every countdown, every well-meaning question from someone who doesn’t know they’re asking me to fast-forward—they all tug at the hem of this moment, trying to move me along. And I understand the impulse. Forward is easier. It has momentum. But forward also means leaving something behind before it’s finished, and I am not finished here.
Something has shifted in me, though. Not resolved—I want to be careful about that word, because nothing has resolved. The ache is still present. The ‘Almost’ is still there. But I’m no longer standing apart from it, watching it approach like weather on the horizon. I’m inside it now and I’ve stopped bracing.
There is a particular grace available in seasons like this one, and it has nothing to do with acceptance. It’s more like clear-eyed presence. The willingness to feel the weight of something without rushing to put it down. This time matters, and I am going to let it matter, all the way through.
My son will leave. The house will be quieter. The jazz will not drift downstairs the same way. I know this. And I am holding it with both hands—the grief in one, the anticipation in the other—standing in the middle of something that is not yet over.
The ‘Almost’ is still here, but so am I.
