Saying Goodbye

Saying goodbye is never a singular event. It is a repeated process of letting go, acceptance, healing what remained unhealed, and allowing new things to emerge.

Saying goodbye is grief in process.

Whether it is leaving an organisation, letting go of a dream unfulfilled, your changing role as a parent, caring for your ageing parents (and therefore the change in relationship), the death of someone close to you (including pets), leaving a city, leaving home, or the loss of natural environments that were part of our landscape; all of it is grief.

And grief is saying goodbye, over and over again. It’s never all done, dusted, and put away.

It circles back in small moments, bringing more layers of recognition. What comes into awareness, spontaneously, is not only what we are leaving or what has left us, but also all the love, conflict, and many shades of human relating that the relationship and context hold.

Each time we say goodbye, though, it loosens a little more of the hold, or our wanting to hold on. It heals a little more what needed healing and was unmet in the relationship.

In all of this, what we have loved and felt connected with still rests with a softness within us.

Each round of goodbye allows us to taste, swallow, and digest another flavour of the relationship, with all its complexities, as life gently nudges us in new directions.

And perhaps, in time, we learn to welcome the new without leaving the old behind.

The new can hold the old.