For the most part, Will has left his world intact. His room is tidy and tended, not stripped bare but definitely looking recently departed, with a burst of packaging and wrappers overflowing the wastebasket from his recent shopping – new underwear, deodorant, clothes they asked for on the packing list. The packing list crowns the heap, dutifully annotated and crossed out. Last laundry. Last essentials. Last imprint on the made bed, where he sat to put his boots on just before leaving.

For about a week, an enormous duffel sat on the floor of the closet, receiving its contents bit by bit as boy wrapped his brain around what was coming. The impression of that 50-pound life boat is still visible in the carpet. The impression on my heart and in the pit of my stomach will take longer to come out. For a while in the days following his departure, I come to stand in the doorway, the open doorway, and breathe. It took me four days to enter his room. Just having the door open was enough.

Will has always been about the gearing up. Why not? Who isn’t? Going into mountain biking years ago – the wheels, tires, brakes, bars, pedals – was there anything original on the bike that finally emerged from the garage with a boy on it? The hours online, researching and upgrading. Bike broken, brain swollen – that era in our home seemed to be less about tires on the trails than hours in the garage, tinkering, tweaking, taking apart. More time, it seemed, in the workshop than in the world. Maybe that’s where we are now. ‘Up on blocks’ a fitting metaphor. “For real,” I tell the car insurance company and the Verizon folks as I make the calls to economize our next chapter. Non-operator.

When the bike world gave way to wilderness world, same thing. Tons of reading, researching, outfitting and gear buying. We made a couple expeditions then. Most recently it was Planet Automotive, our garage filling steadily with a strange layette for his seven-thousand-pound baby, a gigantic diesel Ford F-350 he bought last March. Love of his life. The hours. The time. The attention and focus on something that gave him such joy. Sure, it wasn’t college but the credit hours brought him out of his room and into our sphere once again. By the time it broke down at the beginning of summer, it coulda pulled itself out of its own ditch.

Is there comfort in the gear? Is there courage in the gear? Does the gear seal the deal for the doing? Is it what he needed, in the end, to make the launch? This is a launch 15 months in the making, and not in the direction he was headed to begin with. I did not know, watching him in these last weeks, that we were actually a go. Until we were. Early ride to the airport, quick goodbye at security, a stolen photo and then….gone. Can I tell you how tired I am of purchasing one-way tickets for the people I love most in the world? What on the earth. And yet, there it is – the truest truth: they are each of them somewhere in the world. Just not here.

Will’s leave-taking was like this. Little signs – getting his watch fixed, replacing a pair of boots still under warranty. Maybe after he unloaded his beloved truck (broke down in North Carolina and too expensive to repair or tow home) it got easier, or more obvious and manageable. A shopping trip for gym shorts and toiletries to last a full calendar year. A few errands, a lunch with a friend. It all pointed to leaving, as he said he would, on the date he said he would, to the place he said he would go.

But the lack of communication and discussion never wavered from the isolation and stone silence we had lived with all year, and so it was another dimension of awful. I see that he sold his stock, no discussion. I see that he had some legal documents signed. No discussion. He bought a bunch of tools for Bill, so generous. No discussion. I believe he may or may not have opened a CD on the way to the airport – again, no comment, no discussion. We could have launched a deaf mute and had more interaction. Must the emancipation cause physical pain? I asked the darkened hallway and empty place at our dinner table. Must it? Is there any other way? Are you becoming an adult, or an –hole??! I wanted to scream at the closed door on so many of the days now behind us.

Because what I really wanted back was our son. Our defender. William. The one whose name pointed squarely at this family and gave him a calling perhaps too high for his years. But he met it head-on. He really did. He has for all but one of them been the kindest, funniest, most helpful and deep-digging, life-wringing human on our planet. He has given and tended and cared and been. Oh, how he has been here. He has torn up the woods, the yard, the garage, and then to the best of his ability at this latter stage in the throes of I-don’t-know-what-all, put back what he could. The holes, metaphorical and other wise, have been filled in.

But I mourn the boy that was. The boy who thundered down our stairs a thousand times to welcome me home and offer to carry in groceries. The boy who plotted and pranked and honored and humored and cared and cut up and built and partnered and wired our world beyond what you could imagine if you sat down right now and started imagining for the rest of your days. (See Master of Crime and Better Than Christmas, March 2020). Who single-handedly managed the yard work since he was – not old enough, but heavy enough to offset the safety sensor on the seat of our riding lawn tractor. I remember him pushing that dead thing out of the shed round to my car to jump start it (again! always! At our place “jump” and “start” is a redundancy of terms) and noticing that my tires were a little low, so topping those off before he cut the grass – at 12! He was full of life and mischief and humor and charm and this weird but delightful maturity given the antics, but so. Full. Of. Life. He was all-in, and we right along with him. What a glorious, spectacularly hot mess. Will was a one-stop life hack for what truly matters. Lest you forget. And now he is gone.

Perhaps the most obvious sign of leave-taking was his return to the woods. Each night that last week. I thought he was out there just cleaning up the fire pit as he had done with the rest of the woods in preparation for his cousin coming for the weekend to say good bye. One thing depression does is rob you of any motivation or initiative to do stuff. Even stuff you love. But the woods is where he once lived, remember? For near two months in the pandemic, in a tent, all by himself at the edge of our woods. (See Three Chairs, April 2020) The fire pit was the side yard of tent world, and there were many mornings in the freezing cold I would see him out there collecting twigs to start his fire to cook his own breakfast before Zoom school, once he had hauled down the “bear box” (Coleman family cooler, bright blue) from a 20-foot pulley in our suburban backyard. And so you can see him out there this time around, that final week – hauling debris, chain sawing the pallets from bike ramps and jumps, dismantling his senior assassin outpost, undoing all the life those woods saw lived.

And heaping it all on a giant pyre in our fire pit. Each night, tending the inferno. A couple times, Bill and I walked out to sit with him. He didn’t say much. Maybe a sheepish grin about the size of the flames, or what our modem was doing in the middle of the back yard at the other end of a 30-foot extension cord. How else to get Wi-Fi out here, right? Good lord, is he smiling?? Our boy, back again, a quick glimpse of him in the firelight before he is gone for good. Such was the size of the flames. My word, that’s hot. Are the trees scorched? The two of us sat there one night in what I imagined was companionable silence, looking up into the dark sky as the sparks flew upward and the heat wind made the leaves overhead to dance and scramble out of the way. Such was the intensity of the heat. When I went to roast a marshmallow, I had to do so from ten feet away.

What size is the crater left by the last child? Any last child, not just this one. We have had children coming and going from this home for – count them – 28 years this past September and from our family for 30. Three decades of caring for another, lots of ’em, in their various stages of coming into being. That’s a lot of other. A lot of mothering. Did I feel worthy going into the task? Did we do a good job? Did I? Did I/we come out okay? Did they? What of this long, hard year? He was leaving a year ago, on nearly this same day, before he got in a car accident. What of the wayward ways? The shocking redirection we received that summer. There has been so much I didn’t see coming.

The “Will-shaped path,” I told him as we two huddled on the side of the road after his car spun out on wet pavement and gravel. The Will-shaped path, in contrast to the “world-shaped” path, the one that led to school and all things expected. We will find it, I said as a comfort and a consolation as he sat by the side of the road, broken (his shoulder was, actually), weeping, utterly defeated and in pain. The gap year was going nowhere. The car was somewhere at the end of that hideous torn path leading into the dark woods on a street not half a mile from our house, totaled. A tree stopped it for good. It was so crushed he had to climb out through the sunroof and the sheriff’s deputy who saw the vehicle told him he was very – lucky? What could I/ should I/ would I/ have done to prevent this? And this. And all the rest of it. More time, perhaps, in the workshop than in the world. These are questions we ask a lot lately. I do, anyway. And I’ve asked them more in the past five or six, to be sure, as Will has come into his own.

It is one continuous line of parenting (especially for Bill), and I know that on the other side of the grief and shock I am now processing is the more typical experience of the empty nest. That’s a sadness, too. It is empty, all right. Even ol’ Gus looking a little confused these days. But for this week on the heels of his leave-taking, our home feels a little like the fire pit looks by daylight: completely blown apart as though something volcanic erupted from within and blew out the sides. Bricks cracked by the intensity of the heat and scattered about like broken teeth, the ruins of the pit grinning a gappy half smile. Done. Done in. We were part of it, this crucible of becoming, and I know the days are coming when I will feel the awe and the honor of having been there.

I am not blind. I do see, that the fire burned but did not consume. Woe to those pallets, of course, but we’re still standing. All of us. I’m not blind. I know holy ground when I see it. And I don’t feel “lucky.” I feel delivered. I feel grateful. And overwhelming relief. I feel…defended.