Savor the perfect synergy of arms plowing through water on a perfect September day. Eight strong free style laps completed, the ninth and tenth balancing back stroke that lets me stretch arms and shoulders back and gaze, goggle eyed, into the sunny early evening sky. It is still blue, but with the fading of the day and the season leaching a fierceness from that blue, and investing the bordering clouds with the muscle of cooler wilder days to come. I am in the far left lane, my crushed-disc injured husband slowly feeling his way across the far right lane.

Above us in the life guard stand sits our son, watchful, though not eager, enough attention devoted to the few ancient swimmers doing laps on one of the last days of the pool season. Hearty children and their overdressed mothers are here for after-school, before-dinner final tastes of throwing themselves off the sides and the boards into the deep end with abandon, before the Michigan autumn asserts itself with crisp cool and wind and rain that will require rewrapping of bodies in clothes and coats.

But not today. Nothing hurts today with the body confidence of a summer's swim workouts built into muscle memory and the sun and water making a silky pleasure as I churn through my routine. I practice my new flip turn, learned only days ago from the very boy whose distraction and anticipation of his departure to college barely lets him sit and lifeguard this last time. It’s a delicious irony that we, his parents, bookend the tiny flock that he must tend, our safety nominally in his keeping, when all these years, it is we who have worked, worried and more or less kept him safe. It’s a good thing I have to breathe hard and steadily or my throat would close at the missing I know is coming, can feel already hovering over the growing piles of oversized plastic bags with linens, the stacked t shirts and jeans, fleeces, socks ready to go into duffels and away. The dog knows disruption is afoot and is nervous and whiney.

Flip again, a little too early and I have to kick back up to the surface rather than push off the pool wall. An interesting metaphor; will I have enough air to make it to the surface? Yes of course. We’ve been through so much worse in the parent heartbreak department, but this boy has been the last and a joy. Our fear that the charm of his life will elude him in this new phase is surely unfounded, and is perhaps a cover for our fear that the charm of his life removed will leave ours charmless.