When You Know It's Over
The long goodbyes have begun
When you’ve known you’re leaving for a long time, life takes on a strange sheen. For the last two weeks, I’ve been walking through the days feeling out-of-sorts in a way that’s hard to pin down with mere words.
I feel aloof. Like I’m floating. Like I’m waiting.
Maybe it’s the side effects of the Pfizer vaccine (Marido and I received our second doses on April 5th). More likely it’s the side effects of detaching oneself from a long-entrenched life, of removing books from their shelves, art from the walls, furniture from their well-established places.
Last week I gave my boss an end date (May 31st). Hearing this news, a co-worker/friend began calculating how many Zoom 1:1s we had left together before I leave. He was sad about it. I was… just sitting there.
“Is disassociation normal?” I asked myself, not for the first time.
I googled it. Web MD said, “Dissociation is a break in how your mind handles information. You may feel disconnected from your thoughts, feelings, memories, and surroundings. It can affect your sense of identity and your perception of time.”
Web MD also told me I’ve been spelling it wrong. It’s dissociation, not dis-a-ssociation. Huh.
I decided it’s not dissociation so much as it is disconnection—a certain distance, like I’m viewing my life at some remove. And that seems a very normal thing to feel when I am quite literally disconnecting. I am packing up and giving away everything that’s been familiar, all the bits and bobs that have anchored me to this place and time.
Last Friday, I gave a friend a box of power strips and a pile of pillows. These are not the things you usually get rid of in a move—unless that move is taking you across an ocean, to a place where the power outlets are pronged completely differently.
I thought our house was feeling empty the last time I wrote. Not quite two weeks later, it’s even more spare. The rooms echo when we talk.
This is Filha’s room, where the bed is now on the floor—we’re only taking the mattress with us, so Marido sold the bed frame on Facebook. (Vila is enjoying this super-accessible bed scenario. She thinks she’s acquired a giant new dog bed.)
Speaking of Vila, she is nearly two weeks out from her knee surgery and seems to be recovering well. She’s not allowed to do a whole lot, so she’s been sunning herself and growing her hip hairs back.
“This Orbit Is An Interlude”
This weekend some friends stopped by our backyard. They flew down from Portland, wanting to see us before we move because they have no idea when such an opportunity might present itself again. We have plans for more goodbyes in the next few weeks, including a big “meet us in this meadow in Golden Gate Park to say farewell” shindig for our local friends. We’ve planned one last Yosemite-area camping trip. One (or two) last cousin visits, one last trip to Mimi and Papa’s farm in Illinois.
I know most of these things aren’t the LAST last. But after June, we’ll have to cross the Atlantic to experience them again.
I’m not completely numb. I feel the sadness, layered underneath. Our roots in San Francisco stretch long and deep. We moved to this beautiful, foggy city 20 years ago, and the friends we’ve made here are the friends of a lifetime. I will miss them terribly.
But also, I can’t escape the thought that it’s already over. That it’s been over. The life we lived before; the routines we shared; the meals; the gatherings; the casual, easy ways in which we passed in and out of each other’s days—they’re already gone.
The end began, for me, on March 5, 2020 when the email from work arrived saying, “Don’t come in tomorrow.” On March 11, when Filha’s school wrote and called and said, “Don’t come in tomorrow.” On March 16, when the mayor of San Francisco told us all to stay in our homes.
We have lost so much already, all of us, throughout this pandemic. In so many ways, I don’t quite know how to be a people anymore.
This comic by cartoonist Emily Flake illustrates that feeling incredibly well:
As I navigate all of this, frog feelings and imminent leave-taking and dog surgery and impending end of gainful employment and all, I find myself feeling mostly paralyzed. Like I SHOULD be going out and doing more things “one last time.” I SHOULD be seeing more people. I SHOULD be soaking up this countdown of weeks and days.
Instead, I putter around the same square footage I’ve been boxed up in for more than a year, looking for more forgotten corners of cabinets to scour, sort, toss, and pack. I make to-do lists and cross them off. I bake chocolate chip cookies. I agonize over which books go in boxes on a boat and which get to come with me on the plane. I worry about Vila’s limp. I make piles of once-treasured items for friends. I wait for our passports to return to us, inked with permission to enter Portugal, permission to stay.
And I watch the video of our house in Setúbal over and over.
It’s the one Elda, our realtor, shot after we had signed the deed in February and the house was truly ours. I watch as she climbs the stairs, narrates her way through rooms even emptier than those I live in now. On my small screen, the tile floors gleam, and I can hear rain pattering on cobblestones outside.
I go back to the beginning of the video, watch it all unfold again and imagine us there, inhabiting those rooms, starting anew.
March was Women’s History Month, and to celebrate, I featured a series of interviews with 15 women on my Medium account. If you haven’t read it yet, or you didn’t make it through all 15 profiles, please give them a read when you have the time. These women are brilliant and amazing, and their voices deserve to be heard.
Read the VOICES…
Jamae Tasker is a Warrior of Love
Shayna Hodkin is a Spellbinding Poet
Sam McWilliams is an Intrepid Cliff Jumper
Hattie Anderson is a Confident Black Goddess
Elizabeth Schroeder is a Swashbuckling Peacemaker
Nikka Diaz is a Natural-Born Empath
Kelly Galeano Arce is a Dauntless Truth Seeker
Tiffany Miller is a Nurturer of Dreams
Emma Rekha Marty is a Guardian of Hope
Natalie Patrice Tucker is a Mother of Dragons
Ruth T. is a Queen of Hearts
Tetyana Borshch is a Radical Daydreamer
Brittani West is a World Class Risk Taker
Tiffani Jones Brown is a Lionhearted Listener
Kathy Azada is a Bright Side Enthusiast
Copyright © 2021 LaDonna Witmer
Ladonna,
I understand to the depths of my being where you are right now. I went through it recently myself. As someone who has done it four times, it's a tough place to be. There’s a sense of excitement, a sense of should dos, and a sense of just wanting to take the time to write and reflect on who you are in San Francisco and the life you have built there. This is often overwhelmed by the excitement of the new life you are building.
I know this sounds insane, but I can wholeheartedly assure you and maybe scare you a little bit, that it will never be the same. Your friends won’t be the same, the city won’t be the same, none of it will be the same ever again.
There’s always a sense of familiarity, but you have already and will continue to change over the course of the next few weeks, and months and years, and however long you are abroad you will change. In that change, you, your husband, and munchkin are changing APART from those you would normally change with. It’s a sad but beautiful fact. I know for me now having lived abroad almost ten years, that I love going back to my hometown but it’s not my home anymore. I always said it would be, but in some ways, it never felt the same again, like a stranger you meet and instantly connect with but don’t see for many years.
There is a familiarity in taking a deep breath of pine-scented air in Lake Tahoe, and a love for the feeling of the carpet underneath my feet at my parents home, the joy of their laughter and company, and quietness that overcomes me when I see the sunrise over the Sierra Nevada’s.
That will always be a part of me. It is not home right now, maybe anymore, maybe someday, but it's not right now.
What a lot of travelers don’t realize in their goodbyes is that when you come back to visit you experience these things not as a native, but as a stranger to them. My first time coming home after being abroad I thought the world had stopped, and everything would be the same and everyone would be the same, that the level of intimacy in those relationships would remain and we would just pick up where we left off. The reality was, that the world and my life in Reno and my friends in Reno, that my Reno itself hadn’t stopped. It kept moving.
I felt such a deep sense of sorrow when I realized this, so much sorrow, I felt like I had missed it and let my friends and family down. I’m telling you all of this because I wished someone had told me before I left that it would all be different when I returned. That the fundamental truth is that I was different and that there would be this time of getting to know you that would have to happen all over again for both the place, the people, and me.
I guess I am saying all of this to encourage you to lean into your grief, experience it to its fullest. Hug extra tight to those you are so close to, that one last walk that you know so well, that one last visit to a place you grew and changed as a person, have that one last all-night conversation, or that one last drink, or whatever it is for you and them and the city you have loved so well. Lean into the goodbye, feel it with all your heart. It will make your last days busy and exhausting, trust me it will, but it makes the next place so much easier. It makes the joy and excitement and the ‘do it again’ feeling of a new country and place and people something you can experience without guilt and the unprocessed sorrow and grief.
I hope you don’t think I am butting in or being over-nosey or over-opinionated, but from one traveler to another, this is something I wish I knew in my last months, particularly before I left the US.
Don’t forget to be present at this moment, even when the future is so exciting.
From one wanderer to another,
Adrienne
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