Earlier this month, my husband and I abandoned our youngest child in a distant land to begin life -- and college -- without us.

Well, OK, it's Montana, but it sure feels far away.

We had spent the previous week with him for orientation, where astute school administrators held separate parent and student sessions for the obvious benefit of the latter.

Incoming freshmen met roommates and learned the physical layout of the grounds. Their computers were configured for the university's server. They learned the difference between a catalog and a schedule, what a syllabus and office hours are, how to submit homework electronically and to sign up for cell phone emergency alerts. Where to find food. When clubs meet. How to rent a kayak or repair a bike on campus. In short, how to thrive in their brave new world.

Parents, on the other hand, learned a lot about financial aid. A forum with health center staff was dominated by questions about mandatory health insurance and plans for swine flu outbreaks. From staff psychologists to the heads of housing and food services, we were assured of the university's capacity to accept the torch being tremulously passed to it.

One morning, while waiting in a parking lot adjacent to the University Center, I watched a very intense mom stride past with her daughter. Mom was delivering a rapid-fire litany of offices and services available in the nearby building. The girl, with evident exasperation, responded, "I know, Mom. I know. I was at orientation, remember?"

"Yes," snapped Mom. "But that was a month ago."

I came to regret sharing this exchange with my son, as over the next few days it was pointed out this maligned, unknown woman wasn't the only parent engaged in the ridiculous. My insistence, for example, that his clothes would never be adequately clean if he refused the proffered detergent booster. Or the lunchtime admonition from my usually sane husband that pickled beets must only be eaten if thoroughly chilled.

Poor kids. They didn't know we were down to our last desperate hours and minutes to nurture, protect, guide, teach, comfort. It was our absolute last shot at keeping them safe. Of course we had morphed into maniacs. Furious one moment, weeping the next.

In my mother's family there is a letter, written in 1838, in which a young woman speaks about her infant daughter: "...she is everything to us, but not too dear to be taken from us. May we love but not worship her. Her name is Caroline".

An echo from a time when death was accepted as integral to life; neither abstract nor anomalous. Even so, I was floored to read a mother acknowledge that her daughter's grip on life was so tenuous she attempted to temper her love lest the child die. Knowing the ferocious and absolute nature of the love that arrives with a baby, I suspect Caroline's mother set herself an impossible task.

No generation of children is immune to risk. My great-grandparents, one of whom was a physician, watched helplessly as their children died of diphtheria, a disease recognized today only as the first initial of routine "DPT" immunizations. My grandparents endured the enlistment of all of their sons during World War II. A generation later, my husband's parents put him on a bus for boot camp during Vietnam, just weeks after their son-in-law returned home from that war in a casket. On their paths to adulthood my children have lost both peers and adult mentors to disease, to accidents, to suicide.

It's a heady gift, whether you're ready for it or not, to witness your child achieve liftoff after navigating the minefields of childhood and adolescence. But it's also an ending to something precious, especially poignant when the last child waves good-bye. Maybe parenting has always been a gradually accelerating process of letting go, culminating, if we're very lucky, with capable young adults engaging the world on their own terms.

As for my son? I've no doubt at all he heard the real message woven into our inane advice of that week.

As he walked away from us that last day, I knew what really mattered was what he was walking toward. I boarded a plane and flew home without him to enter a brave new world of my own.

Julie Dreher lives in Anchorage.

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