At 7:30 the next morning, I get a text from Johnny saying that he has a mandatory meeting at 9 a.m. and can we all meet for breakfast immediately? At IHOP he orders pancakes slathered in whipped cream and strawberries. This kid is clearly too young to be on his own.

We head back to the dorm. Double-parking, we step out of the car, and Johnny hugs and kisses his dad, then embraces me in a strong, strapping-young-man hug, burying his head in my neck; this is the exact position we found ourselves in while I walked the floors with him in my arms during his colicky phase, and as he did then, he is crying into my neck.

This shocks me. I haven’t seen him cry like this since I told him that his father and I were separating. I had imagined I might say, “Ta ta for now,” Tigger’s optimistic sign-off, but I can manage only, “I love you, sweet baby.” Reeling back to the car after he walks into his new life, I turn to my ex and say, “That was a lot harder than I thought it would be.” I plant my forehead on the steering wheel. I sob.

Not for long, though. I need to zip my ex to the Denver airport; he will fly back to Minneapolis and I will pick up my father, who is flying in from Detroit to drive home with me. I compose myself, and my ex turns to me and says, “Want a smoke?”

“Sure,” I say.

At the airport, my ex and my dad cross paths, and my dad embraces him in what I am sure is an unwelcome hug. My dad then walks straight to the driver side of my Subaru and says, “Move over, Hon, I’m driving.”

No argument. Emotionally spent, I retire to the back seat. I eat my first gummy around noon, and by 2 p.m. my dad and I are singing show tunes from my dad’s playlist, the songs we’ve always sung together. Shortly thereafter, I demand that he pull off and drive through Taco John’s, and as night falls I request Dairy Queen. The gummies have blunted the rawness and given me wicked munchies. Being his oldest and most challenging child, I’ve shared my gummy-eating indiscretion with my dad; at this point, there is nothing I could do that would shock him, except perhaps entering a convent. My dad insists on driving all night. I lie down in the back, look out the window and chime in to songs from “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “The Music Man” and “West Side Story.”

I am 6, I am 16, I am 54, and I feel completely safe. My dad has disappointed me on many levels throughout the years; like all of us, he is a flawed and wounded human being. But on one of the most emotionally wrenching nights of my adult life, I get to relive something I thought would survive only in my memory: I get to have my dad drive me cross-country while I languish in the back seat singing along and watching the night sky. He is, once again, heroic in my eyes. At 6 a.m., we pull into Minneapolis, and I begin the confusing, uncomfortable process of settling into the empty nest.