Finish Line

There’s a strange kind of quiet that occurs with endings you’ve been expecting your whole life. Not a sudden ending — not the kind that interrupts or unravels quickly — but the kind that comes up on you slowly, almost like turning a page in a thick book. The kind that you grow up knowing will happen “one day” without ever actually knowing when that day is or what it will actually feel like when it arrives.

My dad is retiring from the Marine Corps this year after 25 years of service. It’s a sentence that feels very simple when I say it aloud. Clean. Final. Something people always respond to with “Congratulations!” or “Wow, that’s a long time” or “Tell him I say ‘thank you for his service.’” When I’m told these things, it’s always said with relief, like this is going to be an easy kind of transition — a chapter of this book that just neatly folds into the rest.

I’ve learned that nothing about growing up in the military ever really teaches you how to experience something as permanent as an ending to it all, because life as a military kid is built on temporary things. Temporary homes. Temporary friendships. Temporary routines that you learn to treat like they matter anyway, even when you know they likely aren’t going to last. You spend years adjusting — not just to new places and people, but to the idea that stability is something flexible. You adjust to the idea that “home” is less of a location and more of a skill in some way. That you can belong somewhere fully, even if it’s only for a little while. And then, suddenly, there’s nothing temporary about it anymore. Retirement doesn’t feel like a move. Rather, it feels like a stopping point, like something is being set down after being carried for so long that you forgot what it looked like to stand still. And that’s the part I am not fully prepared for. 

Because I’m a senior now, I’m already in the process of leaving in my own way — looking toward college, toward a future that exists outside of the structure I’ve always known. Logistically, my dad's retirement doesn’t change much for me. I won’t be the one packing up again, starting over again, learning another new place from scratch.

That almost makes it harder to define, because if military life was something that shaped my entire childhood, what does it mean for it to end when I’m already halfway out the door? There’s a kind of distance in that realization, as if I’m watching something that built me begin to close, while I’m already beginning to move forward into something else.

It’s not quite a loss.

It’s not a relief either.

It’s something quieter than that – something I can’t put a name to. It’s more of a recognition that this life, the one that taught me how to leave and how to stay and how to rebuild over and over again, is no longer going to exist in that same way again. There won’t be another set of orders, another countdown, or another goodbye that feels both routine and impossible at the same time.

I believe that that’s where the bittersweetness lives, not in what is changing for me physically, but in what is closing emotionally. In the understanding that even if I’m not the one moving this time, something foundational is still shifting. Being a military kid isn’t just about where to exist in the world, but how you learn to exist in the world — being adaptable, aware, and always a little prepared for change.

My dad’s retirement doesn’t take these skills away — if anything, it makes me realize just how much of them I’m carrying with me. And maybe that’s what this ending really is. Not a loss of the life I had, but a quiet acknowledgment that it did what it was supposed to do. It shaped me into someone who knows how to move forward — even when nothing is moving anymore.