GOOD goodbye

What is your relationship with the word goodbye? Have you ever thought about it? When are you fine using it? When do you prefer not to? What makes a GOOD goodbye?

Like most of you, I had never really thought about the word. I’m not sure I even used it all that often. In fact, I did not become aware of needing a relationship with the word until my father died unexpectedly at the age of forty-nine, and my last conversation with him ended with words of irritation.

At the time, my conclusion originated out of a very dark emotion. And my newly forming relationship with the word goodbye came from a place of fear. In fact, I would make the argument that my new-fangled association with departures had nothing to do with goodbyes at all.

Rather, it was an indictment of anger and a commitment to deny its existence. Which is ironic because anger is often the human emotion that tells us when a boundary has been crossed and we ought to take leave from someone. But I digress.

As I learned to forgive myself for expressing a natural human emotion, I slowly came to believe nothing about those last moments could supersede my father knowing how much I loved him. However, my relationship with a GOOD goodbye was still an expression of fear that simply morphed into an emotional hypervigilance and deeply clingy behavior.

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When the doorknob is eventually turned and footfall officially crosses the threshold, another half hour will be spent in the driveway talking through the rolled down car window. Each small act of departure feels like prying clutching fingers from your arms.

After putting the car in gear, doing a friendly toot of the horn and a generous hand waving out the window, extraction has been accomplished. But for me, the first 10 minutes after departure starts an intense assessing process. I go over every detail of the goodbye making sure nothing was done too hastily, insensitively, or left unsaid.

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When my sister’s life also ended suddenly and unexpectedly by a massive heart attack, a new layer of subconscious need was neatly embroidered into my concept of a GOOD goodbye. It sounds something like this…

“Do Not Take Any Chances! If There Is Something You Admire, Cherish or Appreciate about Someone, for goodness’ sake, TELL THEM!”

It was the year of my sister’s passing that I started a new Thanksgiving tradition of making a list of people who had shown up in particularly generous ways over the course of the year and I wrote them letters of appreciation. These letters initially started out quite specific in their scope and were almost exclusively reserved for friends and family. But over the years, the list has grown longer and wider and I now write letters all throughout the year. The nature of the content has also evolved, transitioning more into a sort of living eulogy where I focus on the unique qualities I recognize and genuinely feel blessed to experience.

In starting this practice, I began to spot a pattern. Kind words make some people quite ill at ease. I found it odd, but persevered with the practice because there were enough people who received them with grace and gratitude.

It was not until my husband, and I made the decision to close our business, and I became the recipient of people’s kind words, that I fully understood the discomfort. Suddenly we found people standing in front of us, endeavoring to assemble words of gratitude that the ordinariness of most days would never dare them to say. I remember feeling a sort of inner buffering, like I could not let it all in. This new awareness became another foundational principle of YOU.logy. Before naming it, let me share a brief story and its insight.

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As a picture framer, I had unique access to people’s stories and personal experiences. Sharing about them was a natural part of the design process and our client relationships quite organically became personal. But visiting a gallery and just being in the presence of art also has a way of opening portals into the deeply personal.

One of our clients had a son who developed a rare form of cancer at a young age. They would often visit the gallery after medical appointments, either soothing or celebrating the most recent development in their health journey. I felt privileged they were willing to share some of the most vulnerable and difficult parts of having a human body. Eventually, the day came when she walked into the gallery without him. And I remember just listening as she spent an hour or more sharing about those last weeks, days, and hours with him.

When we announced our closure, she was one of the people who made a point to come in just to thank us. What she shared with me still breaks my heart wide open. She told me there was a point in her early grief when she could not bear to be in her own company. But she also felt so raw, she did not know how to be in the external world. She told me I was the first person she thought of when she knew she needed to hear her own voice say, “my son has passed away.” She went on to say, “I just knew no matter how I responded to hearing my own voice say those words, I would be OK in your presence.”

I have no idea how I ever earned a place at that sacred crossroad of hers, but I had. And I had no idea…until she told me. Why do we wait to share these things?

After the client left, I shook and remember thinking “that is a significant role to play in someone’s life.”  It is also rife with a sense of responsibility. I am certain if I were truly aware of what was happening in that particular visit, I would have shrunk in its immensity.

The truth is, most of us go about our day saying ordinary things and doing quite simple gestures that affect people in very profound ways. And when someone helps us see it, we trip into the truth found in this Marianne Williamson quote.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.” 

This points to two big insights.

First, we spend so much time trying to be like everyone else that we think we are like everyone else. Clearly, we are not. But we cannot see ourselves like others do.

Secondly, I believe we universally fear our distinct attributes. And collectively, it is as if we have agreed our greatest act of kindness is not demanding greatness from each other. If I don’t mention it, you won’t have to act from it. 

YOU.logy challenges us to shift this paradigm. Up until this point, we have reserved our observations and kind words for traditional eulogies – when our connection with someone has been lost through death. Let’s make YOU.logy a daily practice of spotting greatness and sharing about it NOW – so our connection with someone can be fully lived.

Please share your experience with us! Be it about goodbyes, sharing or…receiving kind words, or an experience when someone helped you see something about yourself that you would otherwise not recognize. We want to hear from you.