I was sitting in a park with my daughter when an elderly man on the bench next to me said "enjoy this — one day she'll be too old to want to sit with you and you won't know it's the last time until it's already past" — his granddaughter was 30

The old man's words hung in the air between us like morning mist. "Thirty," he repeated softly, watching a woman across the park who was checking her phone while walking a golden retriever. "My granddaughter is thirty, and the last time she sat with me just to sit was... I can't even remember."

My own daughter, then twelve, was beside me on that park bench, her legs swinging freely, not quite reaching the ground. She was telling me about a book she was reading, something about dragons and a girl who could talk to them.

I found myself gripping her hand a little tighter, feeling the weight of what this stranger had just shared. He wasn't trying to be profound or melancholy. He was simply stating a fact that had snuck up on him, the way most important truths do.

That conversation happened over three decades ago, and I think about it more often than I'd like to admit. My daughter is now forty-two, with children of her own, and yes, we still have our standing Sunday evening phone calls.

But that elderly man was right about one thing: there was indeed a last time she wanted to just sit with me in a park, and I have no idea when it was.

The invisible transitions of parenthood

When you're deep in the trenches of raising children, everyone tells you it goes by fast. You nod politely while internally rolling your eyes because the days feel endless when you're negotiating with a toddler about wearing pants or helping with algebra homework that might as well be written in ancient Sanskrit.

But here's what they don't tell you: the endings are invisible. There's no ceremony for the last piggyback ride, no formal announcement that bedtime stories are concluding forever, no calendar alert that says "final time your child will hold your hand in public."

These moments simply fade away like pencil marks on paper, so gradually that you don't notice until the page is blank. One day you realize your child hasn't asked you to check under the bed for monsters in months.

When did they stop needing that? Was it Tuesday? Last spring? You'll never know, and that not knowing becomes its own kind of ache.

During my years teaching high school English, I watched this phenomenon from a different angle.

Parents would come to conferences, desperate to understand their suddenly distant teenagers, not realizing they were mourning the gradual loss of small intimacies they hadn't noticed slipping away. "We used to be so close," they'd say, and I'd see in their eyes the same bewilderment I later felt myself.

What we're really grieving when children grow

Have you ever considered that when we mourn our children growing up, we're not just grieving the loss of their childhood? We're grieving the loss of ourselves as essential. There's something uniquely validating about being needed in the immediate, visceral way that young children need their parents.

When my first grandchild was born twenty-two years ago, holding her reminded me what hope feels like, but it also reminded me of a time when I was the center of someone's universe.

As our children grow, we transition from being the sun they orbit around to becoming just another celestial body in their expanding galaxy. This isn't wrong or tragic; it's exactly as it should be. We raise them to leave us, to build their own solar systems.

But knowing something intellectually and feeling it in your bones are two different experiences entirely.

The peculiar heartbreak is that we're successful when they don't need us anymore. Every milestone they reach, every independence they claim, is proof that we did our job well.

Yet each step away can feel like a small betrayal to the heart that once felt their first kick from inside the womb, that taught them to tie their shoes, that knew exactly how they liked their sandwich cut.

Finding connection across the years

But here's what that elderly man in the park didn't mention, perhaps because his grief was too fresh to see past it: relationships with adult children can be equally precious, just different. They're less about proximity and more about chosen presence.

When my adult children call or visit now, it's because they want to, not because they need to or because I'm the default option on a Saturday afternoon.

I take each of my grandchildren on a solo adventure day once a year. Originally, I started this tradition thinking I was giving them something.

What I discovered was they were giving me the gift of seeing the world new again, of remembering what wonder feels like, of being "Grandma" instead of just being furniture in the living room of their lives.

Last month, my eight-year-old granddaughter chose to spend her adventure day at an art museum. Halfway through, she slipped her hand into mine, not because she was scared or needed guidance, but just because she wanted to.

I thought about that man in the park and wanted to tell him: sometimes they come back to sitting with you, just in different ways.

The art of holding loosely

There's a Mary Oliver line I've carried with me for years: "To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go."

This is perhaps the hardest lesson of parenting and grandparenting: learning to hold loosely.

To be present for the park bench moments without clutching them so tightly that we squeeze the joy out. To recognize that our children's growing independence isn't a rejection but an evolution. To understand that love changes shape but doesn't diminish.

What would I tell that elderly man now, if I could travel back to that park bench? I'd tell him that his granddaughter may not sit with him anymore, but perhaps she thinks of him when she passes a park.

Maybe she tells her own children stories about their great-grandfather. Maybe the sitting continues in ways invisible to our eyes but no less real.

Final thoughts

That twelve-year-old daughter who sat with me that day? She lives three states away now, but every Sunday evening, we talk.

Sometimes for five minutes, sometimes for an hour. She tells me about her work, her children, the book she's reading. It's not the same as those park bench days, but it's not less than, either. It's just different.

The man in the park was right: we don't know when the last time is until it's already past. But maybe that's a mercy.

Maybe if we knew, we'd try too hard to make it perfect and miss the ordinary magic of it. Maybe the not knowing teaches us to treat every shared moment as if it could be the last time, which makes us better at loving in the present tense.