Letting Go

When I spoke to my friend Elaine Yaffe about her blog post "Letting Go" (www.botholderandwiser.blogspot.com), she quoted a wise man who told her that "life is a matter of letting go: of parents, of children, of friends, and ultimately of life itself."

Among the many ludicrously false ideas I harbored when I was young was the notion that once my children reached college age, I could stop worrying about them. My children are now in their forties, but of course I've never stopped worrying about them, even though there's no particular reason to worry. But worrying about them is one thing and letting go of them is another. To let go of one's children is to allow them to become independent and to make their own mistakes.

My mother died too young to let go of me, but had she lived longer, she probably would have been like my father, the soul of discretion and tact about my behavior and choices after I had left home for good. He clearly had let go of me, although it was just as clear that he worried about me, as can be seen from the single indiscreet question that he asked me after I had grown up: "Why don't you go out with that nice A-- P-- ?" I guess by then I had let go of him too, because my response was an irritated "Leave me alone, Dad." (Gentle Reader, I married her.)

Naturally, as we get older we lose more and more of our friends. When the Times arrives, my wife looks first at the obituaries to see if she knows anyone on the list. And when my alumni magazine arrives, I no longer look first at my class notes, which have crept alarmingly close to the front of the magazine, but at the obituaries. At my wife's 50th college reunion, the university chaplain, the Rev. Professor Peter J. Gomes, said that fewer and fewer classmates attend each reunion until finally all will be together again and the class will be complete.

Letting go of parents and letting go of children are losses that are also gains. We want our children to be independent of us and we want to be independent of our parents. But losing friends to death is unredeemingly painful, and the only letting go that's possible is to abandon the idea that they could have continued to live, if not forever, than indefinitely. Letting go means accepting their deaths.

Living forever would be an unimaginably horrible fate, but as long as we are in reasonably good mental and physical health, few of us would want to cut life short. Still, death confers at least one benefit: knowing that we are to die, we value life, and, as is the case with all precious things, the less of it that's left to us, the more valuable it becomes, so that after we've reached a certain age - seventy for some, perhaps, eighty for others - we're thankful for each day. Therefore I hope that when the time comes I'll be able to let go and not "rage, rage against the dying of the light." I hope I will go grateful for the privilege of having been alive and for having lived so long.