Before you go #23: Fly like an eagle

Dear Sam,

Well, it’s almost all over.  We made it through prom and the senior prank and senior skip day and the baccalaureate Mass and graduation. 

In a few weeks, you and I will head to the University of Northern Iowa for your freshman year college orientation.  And then I’ll blink, and we will be packing you up to move away from me, a first small move, less than a hundred miles away, but symbolic and heart rending just the same.  I’m ready and not ready.  You are all the way ready.  You’ve been leaving me minute by minute and further and further away from the moment they pulled you from my body and you took your first independent breath.  It feels like that moment was just a heartbeat ago.  It makes me think of a quote I read once when you were little.  “No one else will ever know the strength of my love for you.  After all, you’re the only one who knows the sound of my heart from the inside” (Kristen Proby, Fight with Me).  Do you feel that still?  Do you know how fierce and all-encompassing my love for you has always been?  I hope you carry it somewhere, under all the busyness and manliness.  I hope these letters I’ve penned always remind you. 

The Mass was probably the hardest event for me.  I expected that to be the graduation itself, but that felt colder and impersonal—like I was watching you on a screen or from a distance (it was at a bit of a distance as we arrived later than I had hoped and ended up watching from the balcony of the gym).  And there were lovely speeches, but none from anyone you were particularly close to, and an endless reading of names, some of which we knew well, some we recognized vaguely, many we knew almost not at all.

But the Mass was an entirely different story.  You sat with us, for one thing, and though I resisted trying to hold your hand or throw my arm around you, I snuck peeks at you now and then and your beautiful profile brought tears to my eyes again and again.  I envied the girl-mom in front of us who kept her daughter in physical contact the entire time.  I knew you wouldn’t tolerate such treatment, so I kept my hands to myself.  But, as I’ve documented regularly in these letters, our faith has been the steady drumbeat of our life as a family from the beginning.  Almost every significant moment of your life has been marked with a Mass, and God or the liturgy planning committee seemed determined to remind me of every single one. 

My tears started at the very beginning, as the choir sang the beautiful song “Like an Eagle” (chosen, in part, because our high school mascot is the Golden Eagles).  The melody is exquisite and I have loved the words since I heard the song for the first time at my own graduation all those years ago. 

Like an eagle I will soar above the clouds

I will fly to places yet unseen

Go beyond my wildest dreams

Know that you are watching over me

I think it’s the eagle part that got to me.  I just kept thinking of all the times I’ve yelled “let’s go Eagles” from the bench and the stands, and all the times I’ve read the verse inscribed on the gym wall “those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.  They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint” (Is 40:31).  The eagle is such a symbolic mascot for a Catholic school.  You now wear a bracelet with that verse number inscribed on it—a senior gift from the basketball team (actually, me—you know it’s the moms who coordinate all that, by now, right?  See paragraph one of this letter.  That’s how we tell you we love you in a million little ways every day of your life.  When we aren’t saying it out loud, which we do a lot too, of course).  And then the words of the refrain “know that you are watching over me.”  The songwriter obviously meant God was watching, but I will be, too.  But even that got to me, because I’ve always wondered how parents who don’t have faith to lean on, get through the gargantuan, impossible task of mothering without knowing that there are wiser, kinder, more powerful eyes on their beloved children at all times, but especially when our own human parenting falls short.  Knowing that you are watched over when I grow weary or selfish or distracted is such a comfort to me, and I reveled in that as I listened and wept to the prelude song.  Buddy, we are only on the PRELUDE, and I’m a mess.  Just wait.

The gathering song, which we were all invited to sing but I was unable to offer even a word was “In Christ Alone,” which also had meaning for me.  When you were in elementary school, the music teacher used to choose a “song of the month” which you all practiced and memorized for weeks, and then sang at the last Mass of the month.  I used to attend your school Masses and close my eyes to listen to all your little voices singing.  None of my kids participated in much music or choir over the years, so those all-school Masses were the only place I could hear little voices lifted in song.  It’s a lovely, moving thing, and one of my favorites over the years was “In Christ Alone.”  I used to ask your littlest siblings to sing it for me, and I cried every time—it was just so beautiful, even on a random Tuesday night while I chopped vegetables for dinner. I closed my eyes on this momentous occasion and I heard all adult voices lifted in song.  Because, of course, you are all adults now.  More tears. 

The responsorial psalm was the same one they read at my first communion (I know I’m one of the few people with the combined nerdiness and sentimentality to remember such things, but I do).  “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad” (Psalm 118), and I tried to rejoice in your future and not grieve the past we are saying goodbye to.  The connection to my own religious milestones reinforced my confidence that providing such touchstones and faith over the vanishingly short years of childhood provides a rock-solid path for building a happy life.   I tried to be glad.

Then the Gospel Acclamation was none other than the verse for which you are named!  “Speak Lord, your servant is listening” (from the book of Samuel).  And then they sang “Gift of Finest Wheat” which your dad used to sing to you and your sister when he comforted you or sang you to sleep.  (Yes, it’s sort of a weird choice in lullabies, but one he knew all the words to from his own Catholic education and upbringing).  And then they sang “On Eagles Wings” which is such an iconic song, and mentioned Eagles again, and which I love…

It just went on and on.  I think these moments are called “signal graces” (google says they are “trail markers or signposts” from God that whisper in our ears).  My brother calls them “God winks.”  Again and again, He nudged me, “I see your boy.  I’ve got him.”  And, while I managed to stop short of ugly crying, it was only by the narrowest of margins.  I carried your lifetime’s worth of moments and memories in my heart that evening, and I tried to find the courage to let you go.

So, Sam, when you go, fly like an Eagle.  At the end of my own senior year of high school, I remember writing something along the lines of these words in a letter to my friends. “As scared as we are to take the next step and as hard as it is to say goodbye, it is time for us to move on.  If we stayed where we are, we would find ourselves longing for broader horizons and higher heights.  We would be stifled, and we are meant to soar.”  When I wrote that, I remember imagining an eagle trying to fly within the confines of the Wahlert gym, and just the thought of that made me cringe and shrink my shoulders in revulsion.  I want you to sail off into the clear blue sky, Sam.  Your future, your wings, are in your hands.  I hope our life together, our faith and our traditions, have given you roots.  And now I hope your dreams let you fly.