Goodbye, my friend

Describe the last difficult “goodbye” you said.

I thought maybe the best response to this prompt should be a song. And so, I hope you like this song, but if you don’t that’s also ok.

Now that we have listened to the song, we can continue with the post. I think the only hard goodbyes we ever say are to those who have left us. And the sad part about it all is we don’t get to actually say goodbye, most times, that is. One moment so and so is alive and in high spirits and shortly after, they are gone and that is.

Since in the last many posts, I have been telling you a bit of myself, I will keep to that in this post. I did not have an opportunity to say goodbye to my childhood friend, Awuor. She died too soon, too young. I don’t know what she would have become had she lived to adulthood. But maybe, as Mark Twain writes in Mysterious Stranger, we should look at death as a gift. It could be the thing that spares us from a life of untold suffering or worse.

I miss my mother. I am not sure I said goodbye to her. I just accepted the fact that she was gone and that it was a one way ticket to nowhere. If there is any hard goodbye, it is this. It is unresolved in its indefiniteness. Unresolved in the void it left. Unresolved in the many possibilities that remain unspoken, unattainable.

Goodbyes are hard because of attachments we have to people or pets or whatever. I don’t seem to have any of this. No. I care deeply for those close to me. But I can resolve the goodbyes easily in my head and life continues. In a world of impermanence, goodbyes are the order of the day. They are to be expected. They are only hard because of the timing- sometimes we have to say them when we are least prepared for it, but saying them we must.

Let us prepare to say our goodbyes for saying them we must. At. Some. Point.