How do I say goodbye to the house on Hopeful Lane?

“We’re giving up too much,” Mom says.

She and I are standing in the garage at the house on Hopeful Lane. Late summer in upstate New York. The air in here is sticky and so is our skin. At one end is the growing mountain of boxes that the movers will take in a couple weeks. At the other is the pile of furniture, toys, camping gear, and kitchenware to be left for the estate sale. She’s in the middle, arms crossed, eyes roving back and forth between the two sections. But she’s not talking about the physical stuff.

“We have it so good here. We’ve built a life here. So many people have come over and helped us pack and clean. We don’t have that kind of network in Eugene.” She pauses, then shakes her head. Her mane of silver curls shimmers under the bare fluorescent garage light. “But we’re doing it. It’s decided. It’s time.”

I reach for a hug. A quick squeeze. She lets go. “Okay, time to tackle the tool bench,” she says.

We pick our way through the piles to the side wall, where the big workspace and shelves around it overflow with decades of every tool a homeowner might need. It’s immediately overwhelming. She eyes it with dismay. “We have too much stuff. Our new house is too small. We just have to give some of this stuff up.”

“Just pack it up,” I say. “You’ve purged so much already.” It’s true. They’ve been ruthless. “Homes fit a lot more than you think. You can figure out what else to give away or sell when you get to Eugene.”

“You don’t understand,” she says. “The new house is way smaller.”

But for every item she agonizes over, I say, “put it in a box,” and she does.

*

We’re too alike, Mom and I. We both boinggg! awake in the early morning and are instantly flooded with the day’s to-do list—far too much to ever get done in a day. But we refuse to learn that lesson, every morning waking up with fresh optimism and renewed belief that, today, time will work differently.

The night before, we laid together on their bed, Mom and Dad and me. We’d packed boxes until just after ten. Dad lay next to me, eyes closed, white beard serenely pointed toward the ceiling, breathing slowing toward sleep, as Mom monologued on my other side. “There’s so much to do in the garage,” she said. “Do you think we should take the cross-country skis with us? I don’t think we’ll use them.”

“We won’t use them,” Dad muttered.

“I would like to keep the snowshoes, though. Remember that last big ice storm in Eugene? The snowshoes would’ve been really helpful for walking down the street.”

“Do snowshoes have crampons?” Dad murmured. “You need crampons to walk on ice.”

“They have those little teeth at the front,” I said, “but I don’t think they’re crampons. Snowshoes are for snow, not ice. Take them if you want them, but please don’t try to use them to walk on ice.”

“Okay,” Mom said. “There’s also all the toys. We’re bringing the Barbies and the wooden train set for the granddaughters. But there’s your old electric train—”

“I already told you I don’t want that,” I said.

“Okay. What about the box of Legos? Would you like to have a box of Legos for when you have littles visit?”

“I think we have enough toys.”

“Okay. The thing I’m most unsure about is the tools. We have that whole big tool shelf under the window. And all the things hanging above it. And the power tools. I have a big sander from when we built those wooden frames. Not a sander, I mean, what is it? A power saw. And the electric hedge trimmers. Should we bring those with us?”

“Can you wrap up?” Dad asked gently.

“First she needs to finish giving me the imaginary walkthrough of the garage before we actually walk through it together in ten hours,” I said.

“Ok, fine,” she said, laughing. “I’ll get ready for bed.”

She and I did five minutes of bedtime yoga, like we always do when we’re together. Afterward, we stood at the end of the hallway, where the doors to their bedroom, my childhood bedroom, and my sisters’ bedroom meet. The intersection has been an informal family meeting spot since before I can remember.

“If you close your eyes and your brain starts going over the lists of everything you need to do, tell it—” I paused.

“‘We’re saving that for tomorrow,’” she said.

“Yes, good, ‘we’re saving that for tomorrow.’ My therapist once said to me, ‘You have a baseline of mostly healthy anxiety that helps you get a lot of stuff done. But sometimes it spikes…”

“And then it’s not so helpful.” She smiles sheepishly. “You got that from me.”

I came here to say goodbye to Hopeful Lane. Well, I said I was here to help Mom and Dad pack up their home of 39 years and the memories tucked into its corners and baseboards. And to try to dress it up a bit—to mitigate the years of three children demanding too much attention to notice the scuff marks on the baseboards, and that the trim over the garage was never painted, and the cat hair stuck to the kitchen cabinets. I wind up making three visits in the span of a month.

I act like it’s all for them. But it’s also for me. I like a drawn-out goodbye, and the time to consider if I’m ready to give up the boxes of mementos that keep sprouting from the corners and closets.

They’re trying to get me to take Mom’s wedding dress, since my sisters don’t want it, and Dad’s father’s Westport Fire Department Chaplain official firefighter’s coat, and his grandfather’s gold pocket watch that Shira and I used to love sneaking out of his underwear drawer to reenact the pickpocket scene from Guys and Dolls. I try on some ancient snow boots from my old bedroom closet, and a suit that fits me perfectly. It’s clearly mine, but none of us remember where it came from. I want to take all of it. It’d be unreasonable to take all of it, especially since my car is already way too full of the things I couldn’t say no to.

But their new house is too full, too—the little new house in Eugene, Oregon, that’s the perfect size for their next phase: the phase of retired rabbis living four blocks from their three young granddaughters.

*

A box of mementos sits on Mom & Dad’s bed.

“See what’s in there,” says Dad. He’s propped up on pillows reading the newspaper.

The first thing, right on top: A file folder with my name on it. I flip it open. The first thing inside: “Poster Paper Starring ME,” with my name in colored-in block letters at the top. The first page: My handprint for the Hollywood Walk of Fame, some basic demographic info, a drawing of myself as a baby, and a contemporary photo of me, fifth grade, sitting in a canoe with a life jacket on, smiling at the camera. The poster paper is oversized and folded like a newspaper.

I flip the front page open, and release an involuntary “oh!”

“What?” Dad asks, peering over his reading glasses. I hold up the paper. Stretching across the centerfold is the prompt, “Coming attraction: make up a title for a movie about your life.”

Filling the banner in all caps, at 10 years old, I had written: PURPLE TITANIC.

I have no memory of this, no inkling that I’d ever titled anything else with that phrase. But of course I had.

*

“We’re giving up too much,” Mom says again, looking up from the box of art supplies she just finished taping shut. “You know what the hardest part is? Moving so far from you. I hate that you won’t be able to just come visit us for the weekend. I hate giving that up. I hadn’t really realized that—I’ve been thinking I’ll buy you and Danny plane tickets so we can still see you. But it only now hit me that Oregon is just too far to come all the way from Boston for a weekend trip.”

She pauses and sighs. “But then I look at Daddy. He’s so limited right now. But when we’re out there, he can be lying on the bed resting, and his granddaughters can run down the street to climb all over him and play with his beard, and he’s so happy. And I know this is what we need to do.” She exhales slowly and reaches for the next box.

“I’m not ready for this. But he is. And I’ll get there.”

*

Danny keeps asking me if I feel sad. And my honest answer has been “not really.” I don’t know if I will feel sad, if it ever will hit me.

I hate that they’re moving so far away. Not as much as Danny does. He’s angry about it—not at them, just in general. We’re not sure if it’s his own abandonment issues, or some sort of transfer or displacement of my own emotions, or the genuine connection he has with my parents after our six years together. But he’s feeling both anger and sadness more than I am.

What I’m feeling is anxious. Anxious about the rest of the family being so far away as the ground trembles beneath us. Nothing feels like a given anymore. If I spend too much time looking clear-eyed at the political, social, and technological storm clouds above my head, I start to wonder: Can I count on flights to get me across the country? Can I count on having a job and enough money to afford the tickets? Can I count on being allowed to travel to see my family? This line of thinking is a ledge I have to pull myself back from.

But this is right for Mom and Dad, and though that wasn’t clear when they started this process, it is now. Dad’s had mysterious, debilitating nerve pain in his right leg for four months now that has kept him mostly lying flat. Mom has had mysterious chest pain, probably physical manifestations of her anxiety as she manages packing the house, Dad’s appointments, the logistics of a cross-country move, open houses and showings that haven’t led to any offers. Plus: the stairs, the granddaughters, the amount of crap here. They’re aging, and they wisely read the writing on the wall before they could no longer get up the steps to their house—or so they thought, since it seems like that time might already be here for Dad’s leg.

It’s not permanent, though, we’re all telling ourselves and each other. Even though in four months nobody’s been able to pinpoint the root of the pain or offer him relief.

*

“This was never my dream home,” Mom says. We’re sitting in the car after working out at the Skidmore gym, a break in the packing to “make sure she doesn’t go batso,” as Dad says. More than one off day between exercising and she starts to jump out of her skin—and packing does not count as exercise. “I was thinking yesterday about the possibility of hanging onto it for a few months, in case we hate it and want to come back. And I realized, even if we could afford it, it’s time to let go of this house. It’s been a good home. It was good enough.”

It’s a funny quirk of history—or maybe a lesson in the freedom of choice, or the ways decisions ripple—that I’m from Saratoga, that I grew up in this house anyway. I had a 67% chance of being Canadian. Mom and Dad had offers in the end from congregations in Winnipeg, Calgary, and Saratoga. They chose Saratoga, and I was born at Saratoga Hospital. But I might never have been from this place at all. When I look at it from that thousand-foot view, it seems silly to be attached to a place like this: I could’ve been from anywhere. But I wasn’t. This is home—for me and for them. And so now we’re packing up their nearly four decades of history in this place and hoping that there’s a new home that’s good enough for them on the other side of the country.

*

The nostalgia, more than sadness, comes in waves.

It’s not about the place, I think, so much as everything that the place holds: the people, the artifacts, the drawings, the newspaper cutouts pasted to the closet doors. But when I think about it, it’s always been changing. Years ago, when Ruhi went off to Smith, the big blue metal bunkbed left my sisters’ room, replaced by a double bed for Shira. Later, Mom and Dad turned the family room into Mom’s art studio, painting its dark wood-paneled walls white and removing the synthetic carpet with the big brown plastic circle in the middle where Ruhi had once put a hot pot of popcorn down in front of the TV and melted the fabric into a laminated disc. In my bedroom, the childhood twin bed with the Thomas the Tank Engine comforter has long since been replaced by a futon and a desk and computer.

These changes have happened over time, but what’s stayed constant is the fact of its existence. For me to come back to—with my parents inside.

And that’s, perhaps, what this is really about: If the house won’t be here always, that means my parents won’t be here always. I can’t wrap my mind around that part. I start to think about a time when I won’t have any parents’ house to go to. And it feels so unspeakably sad that I have to backtrack, to withdraw. Even though in some ways it’s easier now than ever to imagine: Seeing Dad walking bent over with his cane, not due to old age, exactly—due to the nerve pain in his leg that we all hope doesn’t become permanent—but that looks an awful lot like old age. Seeing Mom’s hands trembling, also not from old age—from the anxious, frenetic energy of the move and the packing and taking Dad to appointments—but that looks an awful lot like a tremor of old age.

But I don’t want to go down that path. That path also leads to a ledge I have to pull myself back from. This is no permanent goodbye. Mom can still do 80 push-ups in four sets of 20; Dad’s quick as ever with a smile and a joke. Take this moment at face value, I tell myself: a moment of transition. A farewell to a house. A cross-country move. No more, no less.

But after this, when I come back here—infrequently—it will be familiar, but I’ll be a tourist. I’ll stay at the Comfort Inn by the Northway exit 15 or in friends’ guest rooms. This place that still feels like home to me is about to abruptly not have a home for me. The older I get, the more I wonder if adulthood is just the process of coming to terms with the fact that everything changes and we can’t control it, at an accelerating pace.

*

I wake up early Sunday morning, 5:30 am, and it’s not until I’m brushing my teeth in the bathroom that I realize this was probably my last time sleeping here and I didn’t even notice. I chuckle at myself and my sentimentality—if I had realized last night, what would I have done? A special bedtime ritual? Summoned the ghosts of Ezra, Apollo, and Hermes, our long-gone dog and cats, to circle up and whisper memories under the comforter? No, I probably would have just lain awake reminiscing sadly, and that wouldn’t have done anyone any good. Too much to do today. Perhaps it’s good to let these things sneak up on you, to not notice ‘til they’re past.

I sit on the bathmat in the downstairs bathroom typing with my thumbs so as not to wake anyone. This is the moment I have before the day revs its engines and Mom puts me to work, and maybe that’s enough. Maybe writing it down is enough of a way to capture and bottle the time, maybe that’s in fact what I’m trying to do with all this writing. I guess I’ve been trying to put time in my pocket since I was a kid. Just like that gold pocket watch from Dad’s dresser drawer. I’m obsessed with the passage of time, with where our memories go, with how a whole stretch of life that was once such vibrant reality can suddenly switch into something that once was, and the memories can fade like the morning after a dream, until details like the name of a person who was once a best friend or the posters on the bedroom walls I lived in for 18 years can, one bright Sunday morning, be too distant to recall.

*

“I like the idea of being buried next to my boy. If I can’t live near him, at least I can spend eternity with him!” So said Mom in the bathroom last night as we brushed our teeth. She was telling me that someone asked her what she’s doing with the six cemetery plots she purchased here three years ago, for her and Dad and me and Danny and two more just in case. Which reminded me that Danny asked me about the cemetery plots, too, a week or two ago, and I didn’t know and forgot to ask. We decided that she doesn’t need to add that to the list of things to think about right now.

I am, in a way, relieved to be going back to Boston today, relieved to be leaving behind this site of change and slow-burning grief. Back to the life I’m building with Danny, where, for now at least, things feel fresh, full of potential, flush with the memories and keepsakes and time still ahead of us to gather.

*

When I get home to Boston, I lose track of that box of mementos with the Purple Titanic poster for a few weeks. Until one day I’m finally going through the boxes from Hopeful Lane and there it is again, all caps, the movie of my life: PURPLE TITANIC.

And I have the sensation, again, as I open up the newsprint and look at it, that it’s not that everything changes—or not just that. It’s that cycles are coming back around, right on time, the hands of the clock reaching the top once again, pausing for that brief millisecond before they click into a new hour, a new day, a new chapter.

Coda. One month later.

I’m sitting in the front row of my sister’s synagogue in Eugene at the end of Yom Kippur services. She has just delivered a rousing sermon, a call to action to step away from the doomscrolling and figure out what gifts we can bring to make things better in the places where we have some control—our local communities. For me, Boston. For most everyone else here, Eugene.

Dad sits at the end of the row. Now that the stress of moving is over, now that they’ve made it here, his leg pain is suddenly healing fast. He’s been able to unpack boxes, build bookshelves, make granola, even walk the half-mile to my sister’s house pain-free. His new doctor says no need for surgery, just give it more time.

Mom sits next to him. Last night, she pulled me into her new art studio, the small third bedroom. She’s been unpacking, with the same feverish energy she brought to packing up Hopeful Lane. But without the deadline of a moving truck’s arrival, she’s more relaxed about it, even having fun. “Look!” she said with a big smile, pointing at the bookshelves that line the back wall. “Everything fits. We have room for everything we brought. We don’t have to give anything up.”

Shira is between Mom and me, holding my hand. Ruhi announces the page number for the closing song. “This is a little cheesy,” she says, “but as we end the service, I invite you to turn to the people around you and sing our final song to them.” The sanctuary fills with the voices of hundreds of people behind us. I feel mourning rise in my chest. I’m sad that they all live here; that I live so far away; that there’s so much wrong in the world; that the community where I can make change is so far from their community here. I feel tears welling up from under my eyes, and I start to close them, thinking I’ll rest a moment into this sadness and let the melody flow around me.

But then Shira turns to me with an exaggeratedly beatific smile spreading across her face, and I can’t help but return the grin. She presses her cheek to mine, and we sing together, goofy grins matching, turning every few bars to sing wide-eyed and aggressively at someone else.

For a moment, it’s like we’re adolescents back in Mom and Dad’s synagogue together, being mildly, harmlessly disruptive, and Ruhi is rolling her eyes at us from her podium, and Mom and Dad are laughing next to us. And we’re all together, the whole original family band. And some things haven’t changed at all, and everything has changed, but, at least in this moment, I don’t have to give anything up, either.