There’s a particular spot just above my mother’s elbow where her T-shirt (the ones from Costco, she loves them) ends, and her arm begins.
I know this spot now. I know it the way you know things you’ve touched a lot. I didn’t know it five years ago because I didn’t touch her there five years ago, but I do now, every time we say goodbye.
It’s not a long touch. A second, maybe two. My hand goes there while I’m telling her I love her, or while she’s telling me to drive safely, or while we’re doing the small choreography of leaving — me with my keys out, her standing in the doorway in her socks. The hand finds the arm. The hand stays for a beat. Then I go.
I’ve started to wonder when that began and what it means that I’m doing it.
I think about her age a lot
She’s seventy-eight. I have to say that to myself sometimes and let it land.
It doesn’t feel like seventy-eight when I’m in the room with her. She’s still herself. She still picks at her food the same way. She still complains about the same things. She still tells the same three stories about my grandmother that I’ve heard a hundred times, and she still tells them like they happened last week. The version of her in my head is roughly the version of her I knew when I was thirty, and it keeps mostly tracking even though it shouldn’t.
But then she stands up from the couch, and it takes a second. Or she asks me to repeat what I just said because the kitchen had the water running. Or I see her hand reach for the railing on the front step in a way that hand didn’t use to reach for things. And the number — seventy-eight — comes back into the room and sits down with us.
She is closer to the end of her life than to the middle of it. I don’t say that to be morbid. I say it because it’s just true, and most days I don’t think about it, and some days I think about almost nothing else.
It started with the goodbyes
I don’t know when I started. I just know that at some point, the way I said goodbye to her changed.
When I was thirty, I would hug her and say I love you and walk to my car. The hug was warm. The I love you was real. But my hand didn’t linger. My body didn’t pause. Goodbye was a thing I did on my way to the next thing.
Now there’s a moment. I touch her arm — sometimes both arms, sometimes just the one — and I look at her, and I don’t immediately turn around. I take a beat. The beat isn’t long. Probably a second, maybe two. But it’s there, and it didn’t used to be there, and I didn’t decide to put it there.
If you’d asked me, the first time I did it, what I was doing, I don’t think I would have known. It wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t a strategy. It was just a thing my hand did. The strange part is that my body started doing it before I noticed I was doing it. By the time I caught myself, it had already been going on for months.
More Bolde Stories
She doesn’t pull away anymore, the way she used to
My mother is not, traditionally, a touchy person.
She grew up in a household where people didn’t really do that. She loves us — my brother and me — but it comes through in the food she makes and the things she remembers and the small ways she keeps track of our lives. It doesn’t usually come through in long hugs or a hand on the cheek. When I was a kid, and I’d hug her too long, she’d give me a little pat that meant okay, that’s enough.
But she doesn’t do the pat anymore.
When I hold her arm at the door, she just lets me. Sometimes she puts her own hand on top of mine. Sometimes she pulls me back in for one more hug, which she never used to initiate. She has changed, too, in a way that mirrors me, and neither of us has talked about it.
We’re having a whole conversation through these moments, and neither of us is saying anything out loud. I think she knows what we’re doing. I think I know that she knows. But to say it would change it, and I don’t know if either of us is ready for that yet.
My therapist would probably have a clinical name for this
I haven’t brought it up with her. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I don’t want her to give me a label that makes it smaller than it is, and maybe because I don’t want her to confirm what I already suspect.
Because I already suspect. I’ve read enough to know that there’s a name for the kind of grief you start feeling before the person is gone. Cleveland Clinic described anticipatory grief as the collection of feelings that show up in advance of a loss — sometimes years in advance, sometimes when the person isn’t even sick, just old.
The piece mentioned that some people start anticipating the loss of a parent long before the parent is ill, just from noticing that they’re moving more slowly, or that their voice has gotten quieter, or that the person standing in front of them isn’t quite the same person they grew up with.
That made something settle for me. Not relief exactly. More like recognition. The arm-touching is a small thing, but it’s connected to a bigger thing that has a name and that other people have felt, and that isn’t something I made up because I’m being dramatic. It’s something the body does when it knows. Even when the mind hasn’t gotten there yet.
I don’t know if it’s love or if it’s already saying goodbye
Here’s what I keep coming back to.
When I touch her arm at the door, I don’t know if I’m doing tenderness or pre-mourning. I don’t know if I’m being affectionate with my mother or if I’m starting to grieve her while she’s still standing in her kitchen with the lights on and the kettle warm. I don’t know if those are different things. I don’t know if they need to be.
Grief is a kind of learning — the brain has to slowly understand that someone it expected to be there is no longer going to be. I think what my body is doing is starting that lesson early. Not as an act of will. As a quiet, automatic adjustment that the mind is barely involved in.
What I want to believe is that the touching is love, and the lingering is love, and the way she doesn’t pull away is love. And I think it is.
But I also think love and grief, for a daughter at my age with a mother at hers, may not be two separate things. They may be the same thing wearing two different names, depending on what time of day you ask. The body doesn’t sort them out. The body just touches the arm and holds on for a second longer than the goodbye requires, and that’s the whole truth of where we are right now.
I’ll keep doing it. She’ll keep letting me. Neither of us will say what we’re doing. And when the day comes that I can’t do it anymore — and that day is coming, and we both know it, and neither of us will name it — I’ll be grateful that my body started practicing before my mind was ready. That it learned the goodbye in small doses, at her front door, while she was still there to be touched.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
Submit your stories [email protected]
