Every time they leave, I stand in front of the garage and wave goodbye. I watch them pull out of the driveway and down the street, tail-lights growing smaller. They pause at the stop sign, turn left, and are gone. I still watch, just as I have for the last five years, as first one, and then both of them drive away to college. Out into that mean, dark, cruel world that seeks to devour them. The same world that offers so much wonder and beauty at the same time. What’s a parent to do? If you’re an empty nester, you know the feeling. They come back on holidays, and school breaks, and less and less, on occasional weekends. But, things are never the same. They’ve tasted freedom. Then one day, they will drive off to a new home, perhaps with a family of their own. Depending on where life takes them, the visits may be less and less, and I may have fewer opportunities to stand outside and wave goodbye.
I remember being on the other end of that wave. It doesn’t seem like that long ago when life was all shiny and new and everything lay out there before me. My mother, father, and grandparents were all wavers and I guess that’s why I am too. Like my daughters, I used to view that wave goodbye as the first step toward freedom. I’d back out of the driveway and ease away slowly down the road that would carry me away. I’d hit play, turn up the car stereo, and hurl myself into the welcoming arms of the world, never thinking that the things I would one day treasure and miss the most were standing back there in the driveway, waving goodbye.
That is, until I pulled away one day at the end of the Christmas holidays while my mother stood waving goodbye in the driveway with tears flowing down her cheeks. She knew something I didn’t know. She knew something I was too young and naïve, too armored with the invincibility of youth, to believe. She knew this would be the last time she would stand in the driveway and wave goodbye to me. Less than two months later I was sitting in the hospital at her bedside with my grandmother as my mother succumbed to cancer. That image of her in the driveway is forever burned into my memory.
That’s why when I saw a story the other day about a woman who documented this every-day family ritual with photographs of her parents waving goodbye, it hit me so hard. For 27 years, Deanna Dikeman photographed her parents standing in the driveway waving goodbye as she left, year after year. It’s tender and sweet at first. A common sight we’re all familiar with. Then suddenly you flip to the year after her father passed and it’s only her mother waving. There are several photos of Deanna’s mother, waving alone, as she grows a little smaller. A few photos later, her mother is gone, and there is only the garage. There’s no one left to wave. It is a sudden, stark, and devastating visual.
When you lose a loved one, it’s the little things like this that hit you hardest. Images, sounds, smells. Everyday things. I now know what it feels like to have no one left who stands out by the garage and waves goodbye to you. Only parents and grandparents do that and I am fresh-out of all of them. But, I still have someone to stand out there and wave goodbye to myself until the tail-lights fade and the cars are out of sight. I don’t know if Deanna Dikeman knew what a treasured chronicle she was assembling when she started her ritual of photographing her parents waving goodbye in their driveway, but I know that she doesn’t regret taking the time to take those photographs. I wish I had done the same. Cherish every moment, folks. All of it. No matter what side of that wave you happen to be on.
Thoughts From The Orchard 