My brother’s kid is writing a book, and there’s a passage from it that keeps circling in my mind.
In it, the parents of the main character notice something about their child’s name. A name that used to fit. A name that, for years, had been a kind of tether. The thing that held this person to who they were, to where they belonged. And slowly, without anyone deciding it, the tether began to loosen. The name slipping off of them, the way a rope works itself free from a post over a long season of wind.
I keep returning to that image, because I’ve been watching a version of the same thing happen.
Lately I’ve been sitting with the changes that come with aging. What I notice isn’t dramatic. It’s small. The parts of a person you would have named first — the strong opinion, the particular way they carried themselves into a room, the role they always played at the table — begin to loosen their grip. Not gone. Just no longer knotted so tight.
It’s almost as if the act of playing this one identity, in this one life, is quietly coming undone. As if the steadfastness to this timeline is slipping, and something in them has begun the long preparation to return to wherever we came from. The edges soften. The knot works itself free.
This image is an offering of a perspective, not a presumption of what is.
I’ve come to believe that perspectives are powerful. The lens we choose to look through shapes what we’re able to see, and sometimes what we’re able to hold and how we’re able to show up.
I won’t pretend the untethering is easy to experience, or to witness. It isn’t. It’s change, and unfamiliar change in the people we love is one of the hardest things there is. Especially for spouses, who are witnessing changes in the person they know the deepest. That knowing shifting.
This isn’t talked about enough, and when it isn’t talked about, it becomes even harder. Grief in isolation that was never meant to be carried alone.
There’s an expectation that if you’ve reached old age, you are somehow prepared. But no one is prepared. You reach for someone exactly where they’ve always been, and find a little slack in the line where there never used to be any. That ache is real.
And still, right alongside the ache, there can be something beautiful in it.
The same loosening that takes things away can let other things go soft too. Walls you were certain would stand forever start to give. Old defenses, old sharpness, distances between people that you’d long ago filed away as permanent, they can begin to melt at the edges. Sometimes the untethering doesn’t only take. Sometimes as the armor starts to fall, it exposes a tenderness, a softness, an opening.
I don’t know what waits in the great mystery on the other side of this life. None of us do, not until we make that crossing ourselves. So I hold the whole thing loosely. It’s an image, not an answer.
But it’s an image that has been kind to me. So I share it here, in case it does the same for you. In case you’re watching someone you love slip their tether, and you need another way to hold it.
We all came from somewhere. Maybe the loosening is just the slow turning of the boat, back toward the water it was always going to return to.
