And Also With You
March 27, 2020. By Jason Lee, TD ‘22. Jason is majoring in Global Affairs.
By saying goodbye, truly and fully to what we know, we say to Him that we trust in his plans for welfare and not for evil, to give us a future and a hope.
The time that winds up to a goodbye takes many forms. It flows differently, depending. Most often for us students, it's scrambled, trailing zero-hour exams and occupied by haphazard packing, meaning each farewell has to be stolen from an approaching horizon. Other times, time stretches like a rubber band and is nervously tense and a little aching and surprisingly long, and then ends. And still sometimes it’s lonely, smells like antiseptic, and when we finally say it—goodbye—the only response is an echo.
I imagine we’ve all lived each at one point or another, enough times to know that the mess of emotions that accompanies each period of parting has weird flavors. I am talking now less about end-of-semester goodbyes and more about long separations. We are sad of course. We care for those we are leaving, are being made to leave, or that are leaving us; we’d rather them stay, because many songs and poems have been shared and the sheer potential of continued life together, of more stories and meriendas and listening, has a throbbing gravity. In some contexts, anger joins this sadness, especially if we feel we were robbed of the relationship’s natural duration.
I am told there is also happiness. This has always been something of a sticking point for me. I recognize the wisdom in A.A. Milne’s characterization: “How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” How blessed I was to have known you well enough to miss you, to have had the time that we did, and how grand it is that others will now experience the joy that is you my friend, my lover, my brother and sister. Or perhaps the one that is leaving is finally returning home, and that is a rest to be celebrated.
It is also true that there is always God in the farewell. After all, the word “goodbye” is just “God be with ye” subducted together over the centuries. Alongside a call to peace is a reminder that it is not within our rights to truly say “goodbye forever” because who knows how the Lord has twisted our futures. I am therefore a strong advocate of stapling “see you later” to the end of every sendoff.
Yet when it comes time for me to bid farewell I find myself absolutely bitten and chewed up by fear. Ineffable machinations of the divine aside, when I say goodbye to someone or someplace, I am saying goodbye, forever, to this particular relationship in this particular physical space at this particular time in our lives. Perhaps I will see you later—perhaps I will visit this crooked wood, or the silly, painted sewer grate, or we will run into each other in that precarious spiral stairwell again, me ascending and you descending. But the circumstances of our meeting will be different. We’ll still like the same foods and our past will anchor us in conversation as best as it can, but life experienced separately means that maybe we won’t talk about the same things, and the same sights will have different lenses turned upon them. While old wounds may have scarred over, new pains that, this time, I was not there to bear with you may have appeared, and our minds and bodies must shift to negotiate this new emotional geography.
Or maybe things will be just as they were, and the diction coded by our private history will still make sense after all the time apart. The point is that I do not know, and that is frightening. When I say “I do not want to lose you,” entwined with this terror is the fearful and therefore selfish desire to keep the other as I know them, to confine them to this space where I know how to best love them and from which I know they can continue to love me. And since God is love, what I am saying is this: I am sure that God is here. I fear He will not be where we are going.
But He will, and there’s an endless wealth of scripture and human experience to attest to this. I want to emphasize, however, that this should not efface or tarp over any grief we feel when we must say goodbye, forever, to the slice of a companion’s eternity we have come to know. Ecclesiastes 3:1-15 says this:
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing”
As with any scripture, the Lord is saying many things here. He seems to call into question the earlier idea of a “natural duration” to our relationships—they will last exactly as long as they are meant to. That opens its own winding questions, which for the time being I will answer by waving my hands vaguely at A.A. Milne once more.
Rather, I want to point out that each time is listed consistently, without variation, scale, or hierarchy. Each will come to pass, and therefore each must be attended to with deliberate attention. We should not deny to ourselves our frustrations, our heartbreak, our time to weep, die, break down, and pluck up what we thought we would have much more time to nurture and grow. Greet each goodbye, forever, with the full measure of grief it merits, because grieving too can be an expression of our faith in the Lord. By saying goodbye, truly and fully to what we know, we say to Him that we trust in his plans for welfare and not for evil, to give us a future and a hope. In this way, when we see each other later, we may have our time to dance.