I’ve been listening to a book called Mattering. One of the early chapters is about the weight that comes from someone depending on you, and what happens when that weight disappears. The author tells the story of a woman who cared for her elderly mother for years. When her mother passed, she didn’t just grieve the loss. She grieved something more specific. The absence of being needed in that particular way, every day, by someone who depended on her for it.
I recognized something in that. Not the same loss, but the same shape.
There’s a cabinet near our microwave where we keep the medications. The bottom shelf has the shared stuff, Advil, the things anyone in the house might reach for. The middle shelf has a basket with my son’s medications. The top shelf has a basket with mine.
He’s been gone for weeks now. I sent all his medications with him, so the middle-shelf basket just sits there. Filling that basket every Sunday was never just a task. It was something he needed from me, something that kept him safe, something only I did for him. Now there’s nothing on that shelf that needs anything from me. I see it every Sunday morning when I do my own meds, and the absence is specific. It isn’t that I miss the task. I miss being the person the task depended on.
Grocery shopping used to be something we did together. Some of it was just being together, talking, joking around. But some of it was him needing me there in a real way. Reading labels, comparing prices, figuring out what to make with what was available. He needed me to walk him through that, to be the one who knew how, to be necessary in that specific aisle-by-aisle way.
Now I put my AirPods in and listen to a book. I shop. There’s no one in the cart who needs to learn anything from me today. No one who needs me there at all.
It’s not that I miss the activity. I miss being needed for it.
I think about what this means in the longer term, and I don’t have a clear answer. Most parents know the general shape of this. Kids grow up, they move out, the day-to-day reliance fades on a predictable timeline that everyone more or less expects, and there’s a kind of comfort in knowing the shape even when it’s hard. I don’t know what that timeline looks like for us. It might not be him moving out in the traditional sense, unless that eventually means a supportive living situation. With the separation, it might mean longer stretches like this one, several weeks now, six months somewhere down the road. Or he might end up staying with me, and this version of being needed becomes simply my life, indefinitely.
I don’t know which of those it is yet. Maybe once we do, this will feel less stark. Less noticeable.
For now, there’s a basket on a shelf that doesn’t need me, and a quiet car on the way home from the grocery store, and the particular grief of not being the person someone depends on, even for a little while.
