We had game night at our house on Friday. We do this periodically, getting friends together for a night of board games—sometimes old adults (my husband’s and my friends), sometimes young adults (my son and friends), sometimes both together. This was just young adults, and it was an unusual gathering: It was the last before my son moves out of my house.

We leave on an epic road trip in a few days, driving half-way across the country to deliver the lad to graduate school. (No, our house will not be empty while we’re gone.) Once there, there’s no expectation that he’ll ever be back with us in any full-time way. We’ll see him for holidays, of course. We’ll have a great new place to vacation. But very likely we’ll never again live together.

This has loomed over my summer.

I’m a person who prepares for sadness in advance. I grieved for years before my first dog died of old age, holding her asleep in my lap even at a young age and realizing that someday I’d no longer be able to do that. I don’t know if it lessens the ultimate grief or makes it more manageable; it’s what I do.

So the upcoming parting from my son has been with me at least since the day we watched him graduate from college and headed back home with him for his last summer in our house. It has filled me with sadness even as I enjoyed his company. On Friday, as my house began to fill with young men, there was no place else in the world that I wanted to be. As the game boards came out and the laughter began, I sat quietly with a book in the next room, taking it all in.

Of the five young men who joined my son at my dining room table, I have known three since their third-grade year and one since the start of high school. They and my son have run in a pack, sometimes seeming to spend entire summers in each other’s company. They’ve grown up together, learned to drive, gone to prom, gained and lost girlfriends, started and finished college. And I’ve felt like I gained sons. I love these boys (and I know they’re men, but to me always boys) like my own, and I suspect their parents feel the same way about my son. It takes a village. We are that village.

So Friday.

When my son asked to have friends over for game night, I happily delayed the summer’s last escape-to-Michigan weekend, both so my son could have this last night with his friends and so I could. I sat soaking in their laughter and camaraderie and love for each other (though they’d never say it, I’m sure), knowing how much I will miss it and them. I hope and expect to have them back sometimes during holidays, but I know these nights will be few.

So Friday was precious. And I told them that. And they let me, probably because they know I’m a “spare mom” to them just as they are my family’s “spare boys.”

I didn’t take a picture of them at the table. I thought about it, but it seemed too sad, too final. I want to believe they’ll be back.