All It Takes - Part 2: The Road There

This is the second post in my three-part series All It Takes, a reflection on the empty nest, distance, and the quiet effort of making room for a life that did not arrive by choice, but still asks to be lived fully.

One of the ways I have learned to live this new phase better has been by changing the way I think about the journey to see my son, Dimitri. The distance is still there, of course. The drive is still long. I still wish he were closer. But over time, I have understood that if I could not change the fact of the distance, I could at least change the way I inhabited it.

We often divide the trip and stop somewhere for the night, sometimes for two nights. At first it was simply practical. We do not love long drives, and breaking the journey made it easier. But little by little, those stops became something more. They gave the road its own place in the experience.

Now, when my husband Luca and I travel to see Dimitri, I try to think not only about the arrival but also about the road itself. We stop in places we would never have known otherwise, and what began as a necessity has slowly become, at least in part, a pleasure. This time we stopped at the Beekman Arms in Rhinebeck, New York, the oldest operating inn in the United States, a place where George Washington once slept and Franklin Delano Roosevelt often returned.

• 

• 

This shift may seem small, but for me it has mattered. When something in life changes in a way you did not choose, there is always the risk of seeing only what has become harder. I understand that feeling very well. But I am also learning that there is another possibility: to work gently around the change, to create rituals, to soften what feels hard, and to make the new shape of life more livable and more your own.

Even the practical details have become part of this. Eating well while traveling is not always easy, especially in the United States, so I prepare. I bring snacks, almond milk, whole wheat bread, and a few familiar things. I make sure we have plenty of water, and I often think of something special to bring Dimitri as well. These are small gestures, but they matter. They help me feel that I am not simply enduring the journey, but taking care of it, and of us, along the way.

What surprises me is that this effort no longer feels only like effort. It feels like a way of protecting the joy of the reunion. It feels like a way of giving shape to this period of life instead of simply being carried by it. And perhaps this, too, belongs to longevity: learning how to preserve connection and pleasure even when love no longer lives next door, but farther away, across hours of road.

I still miss the old ease of having him close. That has not changed. But I have begun to understand that joy does not always wait at the destination. Sometimes it begins earlier, somewhere along the road, when the journey itself becomes part of seeing him. Next week, I will write about what happens at home after that: how life changes with Luca and my daughter Calypso when one phase ends and another begins.