How many more times do we have?

Saying goodbye to a house, the pull of the ocean, and tulip fields.

I remember the first time I saw the view out the window. The water’s surface glimmering in a restless shimmer like a thousand diamonds scattered, each one winking in and out of brilliance as it catches light from the sun.

I must have stayed by the window for hours, watching the view change from a luminous surface of glints and gleams to a tranquil mirror of reflections.

I have taken a hundred photos of this view and not one of them the same. From the dusky early mornings on the balcony, jet lagged and impatient for the sun to rise, to the very last light of day. Sometimes the sun would set in ribbons of pink, and on other nights I’ve watched the entire sky light up like fire, the ripples below reflecting colors like a drop of red ink in blue waters.

We said goodbye to this view and this house last week, a house on the water’s edge of Puget Sound in Washington state. A day we all knew was coming—eventually—but uncertain of when, after my step father-in-law passed away a year and a half ago.

Each visit to the house since, we would wonder if it would be our last.
And then suddenly, it was.

We flew in to help my mother-in-law settle into her retirement home in Seattle because I’m famously efficient at organizing and unpacking. Traded in that waterfront view for peace of mind and a life less isolated. Within two days I had everything out of boxes and had her belongings put away and organized, down to the jars of paperclips and rubber bands.

The new apartment felt like a home again, while the empty house stood eerie as if primed for the ghosts of past lives.

Mark and I walked down to the beach from the house one last time, a path that cuts across a jumble of dense, gnarly bushes that the kids and I love to pick blackberries from. In early April, we find the trail muddy and nearly unrecognizable, the bushes cut way back with young green shoots in patches of clearing that are usually overgrown with ferns and moss in the summer.

Once on the pebbled beach, I search for a rock like I always do and stash it away in my pocket to bring back home to Brooklyn where I’ve collected rocks from every beach I’ve visited for as long as I can remember.

In times of transitions, I am pulled to the water. Water embodies change without resistance; it never keeps a fixed shape.

Five years ago, we drove straight to the north shore of Long Island after my mom sold her house too. I needed to be consoled by the ocean, to see the open horizon. I remember watching the waves roll in as I kept replaying a familiar scene in my head, of looking back at my parents waving good bye to us through the car window from the driveway as they always did when we came for monthly visits.

After we placed my dad into memory care in the Fall of 2020, it was just my mom standing alone in that driveway, waving after us. It was only then that it hit me that he was no longer home. A few months later my dad was gone, his body feverish with Covid. Seven months after that, my mom sold the house.

How do you say goodbye to a house?
How do you move on from all the memories locked inside its walls?

Neither of these houses were ones that Mark or I grew up in, but it’s the houses that our kids will remember. I think that’s why it hurts so much; it’s like leaving behind pieces of their childhood. We watched them grow from little kids into moody teens, wanting to pull away with typical teenage withdrawal, then circle back and re-engage again—a full arc of their childhoods held inside these two houses. It’s the stuff that makes your heart ache.

I think back to how much harder the transition was with our fathers, to place them into nursing homes against their wills, particularly in 2020 when nursing homes were a death sentence. But that was how desperate my mom and I were, and how untenable it had become to keep my dad home as his Alzheimers advanced and he became a danger to them both.

The space that many of us in mid-life are inhabiting right now—navigating the beginnings and endings all at once, watching our children gain independence while our parents lose some of theirs—we’re holding two generations together.

It makes time feel more finite when you start measuring your life in “how many more times…”

How many more times will we say goodbye in the driveway?

How many more times will I hear their voice on the phone?

How many more times will I see them in their favorite chair?

How many more times?

***

The tulips

Is there any other flower that symbolizes new beginnings than tulips? Sometimes I feel like I’m eternally searching for signs. These beauties push up from the cold ground of winter as one of spring’s first blooms and dazzle us all with their colors.

Skagit Valley, about an hour north of Seattle, features the largest tulip fields in North America. We were here once, maybe ten years ago, and I wanted to see the fields again since we happened to come just as tulip season began.

After being starved of color from all the snow and gray in a NYC winter, walking among the tulip fields was a joy.

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Related reading

A summer homecoming

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Some interesting reads

• Don’t Call Them Retirement Communities. The founder of Modern Elder Academy is on a mission to make “Golden Girls”-style living mainstream. (NYT gift link)
  It’s wild that I’m officially in “retirement community age.” My mom lives in an over 55 condo community and it hit me last year when I turned 55 that I could legit live there. Co-living communities for older adults make so much sense, though. The social connection alone would make it worthwhile. I think it’s possible to die of isolation and loneliness.

• How to give a compliment (Psyche)
  Some really good tips here!
  “The thin line between compliments and flattery is formed by sincerity.”
  Compliments are a learnable skill (maybe receiving one is too), and we can all use a little more kindness.

• How math and literature are unexpectedly connected (CBC)
  A study from mathematician, Sarah Hart, on how these two seemingly distant disciplines are deeply intertwined.
  "The universe is full of underlying structure, pattern, and regularity, and mathematics is the best tool we have for understanding it."

• I went on a senior citizens cruise. It felt like middle school (Salon)
  I have been nagging my kids to take every advantage that a college campus has to offer, because when else are you going to live in that sort of enclosed environment where you can learn, socialize, see a show or a lecture, and have your meals cooked for you? Well, when I told them all about grandma’s new home where there are lectures, shuttles to outings, a dining hall, and activities, my kid yelled into the phone, “you said that college was the only time in my life that I could experience that!”

• Gideon Tsang’s blurred and distorted work is nature photography as you’ve never seen it before (It’s Nice That)
  I love a beautiful, intentionally blurred photo, and Tsang’s work is just lovely.

• Where Would the Culture Be Without Martha Graham? Twyla Tharp, Donna Karan, and More Weigh In. (Cultured)
  I first learned of Martha Graham in my music classes in college. Her interpretation of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which she choreographed at the age of 90 in 1984, was my first introduction to dance as an art form and it left a huge impression on me.

• “Mom, What Were You Like in the ’90s?” Look to the Fall 2026 Runways (W Magazine)
  Everything comes back around. My kids will forever lament that I gave away most of my 90s clothes before they were old enough to wear them, not that my 5’11” daughter could fit into my old jeans anyway. I’ll leave the low-rise flares to the kids.

Till next week – JP
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