The Long Goodbye

The thing that makes life worth living is companionship, be it of family or friends. You start out with family, and accrue friends grade by grade. It's not very long before you start experiencing attrition. At that early age, what sometimes happens is that some friends move away, and it's not fun. I can't recall exactly what the level of pain was with such cases. Mainly there wasn't a last meeting. You saw someone one day, and that would turn out to be the last time. Only maybe once did I knowingly say goodbye for the last time to a childhood friend.

I've had to do it a couple of times recently, and I didn't really enjoy it. I suppose that's no real surprise- who would? I didn't really know how precisely to handle it. In one case, I lingered as long as I could, trying to make the most of the waning moments. In the other, being in a group with the person, I could hardly monopolize the person's attention, as they all cared as much as I do and were perhaps going through the same thing. I don't know if other people do, but even so it's times like that that I still feel as if I have a way to go socially.

After childhood, the gaining of new friends moderated by the loss of old goes on. You get to a certain point when you know it's at least the last time for a long time. Nonetheless, the knowledge outweighs that. It's hard to know how to say goodbye. It's difficult to elevate the standard goodbye into the permanent one these days. It used to be that a handshake was ordinarily enough, and so then a hearty hug was then a lot more at the time of the final parting. Unfortunately, perhaps over-exuberant friends have made that hug the standard. No matter what I do, it seems like I'm not doing enough to do the occasion justice.

Maybe it's just as well. I guess since everyone's in control of their own fate at that point, a reunion in the future is at least possible, and being a distance away no longer precludes easy communication. You can't say goodbye anymore, but there's almost no reason to anymore.When a kid left town in the third grade, we knew that was it. We didn't know then that it wasn't really it, since any kid whose name we remembered we'd be able to look up online. On the life-long development goes. I hope that I don't have to say a big goodbye to anyone else for a while. I have to think some about how I'm going to do that.