…is what my mom said to me the first day of college. “I’m only 100 miles away.”
Standing on the sidewalk of North Dorms, sobbing to the point of chest pain, I watched my parents drive off back to New York. My leap of faith to go to college in Philadelphia was far from my norm.
Throughout that first year, I kept returning to my mom’s words.
She’s only 100 miles away.
I would repeat it. No matter what happened, it was only 100 miles.
And if you are like me; someone who turns distance into something you can control, I didn’t think of it as a stretch of highway. I broke it down. Ten miles, ten times. Something about the word only made it feel manageable. Like it wasn’t really distance at all.
By junior year, that promise was tested for the first time. My dad made it to my apartment in under 2.5 hours and took me back to New York to get the help I needed. In that moment, 100 miles was real.
After I moved back to the Philadelphia area for work and love, those 100 miles started to shift. At first, I could still cross them easily. Birthdays, holidays, family dinners; I would leave early, drive late, practically enjoy the traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike. I learned how to time my life around the Belt Parkway and how to arrive without being late, how to leave before I really wanted to. Wiping my tears away the second I pulled out to Roslyn Road and got past that first light became my routine.
The trips became more deliberate over the years. I stopped going to everything. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t be everywhere at once anymore. The job got harder, the baby got bigger, I got more tired. The 100 miles didn’t disappear, but they just started competing with everything else. And slowly, they stopped feeling like only anything.
I’ve lived in the Philadelphia area for a little over twelve years. I’ve stayed with the same company. I’ve grown into a wife, a dog mom, and then a mother. But just 100 miles away, another version of me is still there.
She lives in my parents’ house. She sits at their kitchen table. She is at every dinner I missed, every birthday I wasn’t at, every “stop by if you can” I didn’t make. She watches people I love keep living without her in the frame.
How do you explain grief for a place? The truth is, I can go back to the place. The streets are still there. The houses are still there. What I can’t go back to is the moment in time when it meant something different. The feeling that anything could happen on a Friday afternoon after school. The excitement and comfort of going to my aunt’s house after Christmas dinner. The certainty that everyone I loved was exactly where they were supposed to be. Now I catch glimpses of it in photos, group texts, and social media posts.
And then I was there again, driving those 100 miles.
Except this time, it wasn’t college drop-off or a holiday visit or one of those quick drives where I’d turn right back around. This time, my aunt was dying.
And I didn’t know what to do with that.
Because life where I was didn’t stop. I still had work. Friends. Plans. Phone calls I kept meaning to return. Meanwhile, she was getting sicker. That’s the part I can’t really explain to people. She got sick in the background of my life. Not because she mattered less, but because everything else kept moving, too. I think some part of me stopped looking too closely because I didn’t know how to carry it otherwise.
She was smaller, but she sure still made the room brighter being in it.
I saw her four times that week. The last was in hospice.
My dad took his three children in to see his sister. Following behind him felt familiar. The lights were off in the room, and I hated it. It felt like the room was trying to disappear around her. I had seen people in hospice before, but it wasn’t like this. I could feel my sister’s heart breaking next to me on my left. My dad and brother stood to my right, silent. And I just stood there waiting to be told what to do next.
When I think about her, I don’t think about the big moments. I think about all the small ones I missed while I was busy living through my own life somewhere else. The texts she’d send checking in about some HR problem I mentioned once when we were sitting at the beach. The follow-up questions days later. Her cards for every silly little holiday arrived on time, always. She had the littlest ways to stay involved in my life, even from 100 miles away.
That was the last time I really went home. And it ripped me apart.
Because now, 100 miles away from me is a family, my family, still trying to remember her laugh. Still reaching for stories, old voicemails, anything that lets us feel like she’s still here for another second.
It’s 2026 now.
She’s gone. The house I grew up in looks the same, but feels different. Yet, I still get sleepy sitting in the living room. When I come home, my mom still asks me what I want to do that day, but my list of ideas have gotten shorter. I don’t really know what to do there anymore. That’s the strange thing about leaving, about grief, and about everything in between. Eventually, you forget what you used to do there.
People moved, drifted, shifted into different versions of themselves until I could no longer place what anything used to be. I can’t really go back anymore without feeling like I need permission from a past version of my life. It hurts too much to see what was and what it has become. It hurts too much to see what was and where it is now. The cracks in the tile at my parents’ house have grown, and I never noticed them before. The cabinets look smaller, the memories in my bedroom feel like a dream, and the neighborhood feels quieter. Everyone looks older in ways that seem to happen all at once. I think about the yellow house a lot. It used to be where everyone ended up.
Eventually, going home stops feeling like return and starts feeling like evidence of time passing without you. And maybe that’s the part I was never prepared for. By the time I realized it was ending, it already had.
It’s only 100 miles away, right?
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