In George Steven’s film “A Place in the Sun,” Elizabeth Taylor stands in the iron door of Montgomery Clift’s cell before he takes the last walk to the death house.

After a long pause she whispers: “It’s like we’re always saying goodbye.”

I didn’t need to watch that again.

June 18. They left this morning — my youngest daughter and her husband. They were here as part of the family plan to give their old man love and comfort in the last weeks of a bad spring.

But they have learned to only say, “See you soon.”

In late July the older daughter Dawn (the third generation graduate of Colby College) and her husband, will spend two weeks in a splendid rented lakeside cabin. It, too, will be a gifted visit. And then, they have changed “Goodbye” to “See you in July,” and fly back to work in the City of Angels.

Waterville, you see, is the Joly ancestral family home where, every August, Kay’s parents would send tickets for my daughters and their mother to spend August in Maine. And left this old man with the dogs. And I thought THAT was hard.

Does this all sound familiar? Of course it doesn’t, you’re normal. And I’m a kid dressed up like an old man. Gimme a break.

In the early years Maine was the “normal” land, the ancestral base where it was fun to be young. The college years were when we chanted “Goodbye, have fun” as off they went to Sarah Lawrence in New York, and Paris.

We kept using “Goodbye” when Jillana went to New York Law School and then back to LA to become an agent, and Dawn went off to Paris to speak French like Leslie Caron and study art.

So here I am in charge of this sacred place where She, the mother, wife and lover, actor, dancer and beloved teacher spent an hour of each morning reading her missal and sorting through piles of her students’ grades, and correcting these columns.

Her old desk is full of framed photos from years of celebrations, birthdays, anniversaries and graduations left for me to paste in albums.

Do people in this age of iPhone cameras still do that?

So this is what she’s been doing all these years here at this cluttered desk, paying our bills, reading this missal and collecting pictures of little girls growing to women who came home over and over to shout “hello” and whisper “goodbye” into outstretched arms?

OK. The youngest daughter and her husband are gone. And I’m sitting here waiting for bedtime.

Well, if I can stay alive and cognizant another day, week or year, they and their husbands will come again to sit around the table, raising our glasses of wine, fake beer and diet Coke, in a toast to the Great Lady in the portraits and millions of photos I’ve collected of She, who gave them life, and taught them to live with grace and dignity.

Each night before bed,  I turn out the lights and kiss all the shadows around each room hoping one of them is She, and whisper, “Let’s stop saying goodbye, OK?”

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.