The Gift of Making Yourself Disappear
NEW YORK TIMES - Guest Essay
The Gift of Making Yourself Disappear
Aug. 2, 2025
By Jake Halpern
Mr. Halpern, a journalist and author, is the host of the podcast “Deep Cover.”
For my next act of fatherhood, I plan to help my son disappear.
My oldest son, Sebastian, is about to turn 19 and — painful as it is to admit — what he really needs is a little less of me. OK, a lot less of me.
When I was his age I pulled my own vanishing act. I left college, drained my bank account and bought a plane ticket to Prague. My plan? Live cheaply and finish my screenplay about a con artist who falls in love with a beautiful one-armed girl. I promised my parents I would check in by pay phone. This was 1994. My family had no cellphones, no GPS and the only inbox we checked was the one nailed to our front door. You could actually vanish back then.
This sort of escape, of course, is a privilege — something you can do easily only with a passport that opens doors and a future to return to. I didn’t appreciate this at the time. My mind was on other things, like whether my backpack would fit in the overhead bin.
The first leg of my trip was a train ride to New York. My father drove me to the station in downtown Buffalo. The moment felt like “Fiddler on the Roof” in reverse. In the musical, Tevye says a tender goodbye to his daughter at the station, as she departs for a life far from home; and here was my father, bidding me farewell as I returned to the land from which we came.
My dad was so upbeat about my grand adventure. Both my parents were. It wasn’t until I boarded the train and glanced back through the window that I caught a glimpse of something else. The glass was tinted: I could see Dad, but he couldn’t see me. I watched as he searched the long line of windows. I saw his worry and his sadness; the breeziness had been an act and also his gift to me.
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Sebastian starts college in January, and in a strange, almost mythic twist, he’s heading soon to Prague. The same city. The same age. The same beautiful, naïve hope of becoming something else.
The thought of his vanishing makes me twitchy. I suppose these days, not knowing where your kid is feels like negligence. But when I constantly check in with him am I really trying to protect him or just calm my own nerves? With this in mind, I’ve come up with a few rules for myself. I’m not going to text him — at least, not too often. And I’m turning off location tracking on the Find My app. I need to help him escape my digital grasp.
When I lived in Prague, my parents drifted quietly to the edges of my mind. I soon became obsessed with a bit of family lore and finding the man who’d hidden my great-uncle from the Nazis. I tracked him down and interviewed him. This became the first story I ever reported — and started me on the path to being a writer.
News from America came slowly if at all. I learned, for example, that a distant relative had died almost two weeks after her death. I still remember reading that letter in the mail and feeling so far from home, like some kind of old-fashioned merchant on the other side of the world. I want this for Sebastian, the freedom that comes with distance and the quiet magic of being impossibly far away.
Sebastian recently remarked to me, “Dad, I’m no longer a part of anything.” And in a way he is right. High school is over. His friends are scattering. The track team that he led, as captain, is no longer his. But in this void, there is space for reinvention.
Every immigrant knows this. My paternal grandfather left his home in Eastern Europe when he was about 19 years old, stowing away on a ship bound for America. He wasn’t running for his life or escaping abject poverty. He had parents, siblings and a home. He was, I suppose, following his own desire to vanish. In this way, Sebastian is answering a family calling — a steady pull between continents — that evidently takes its hold in the 19th year.
When I look back on my own departure for Prague, I was pretending that I had a plan as much as my parents were pretending to believe in it. It sounds like deceit — which, in a way, it was — but this wasn’t a failure of honesty so much as it was an expression of love.
Being the parent of a teenager is an act of vanishing by degrees. A slow retreat. And now, it’s my job to see it through, to recede quietly so we both shimmer into invisibility at the exact same moment.
I am trying very hard these days not to talk too much about the Prague I knew and, in some ways, still pine for. The city sometimes feels like a lost love. I take some solace knowing that Sebastian will soon be walking those same twisty, cobblestone streets. But his Prague will be different. And I hope that some part of what he discovers remains, forever, a mystery to me.
In the meantime, I will be waiting for him. And trying not to text.