A Meander Inspired By Unspoken Goodbyes

...and the accompanying heartache that reminds us we are alive

I will admit that I am one of those people who sometimes leaves gatherings without going through the ritual of goodbyes. I might be the one who quietly snuck out the back door, being sure to tell just one person I was leaving so as not to worry anyone. I will grab my empty dish and quietly slip away, looking back to enjoy a voyeur’s view of warmly lit bodies and inaudible laughter through the quieting glass. I wouldn’t say I dislike goodbyes for the reasons most people might, but I don’t like the fuss over the gesture. Goodbyes can be so full of pleasantries and annoying quips and I just want to say “Let’s get to the point: Okay, BYE!” and get cruising. I’m standing by the door to get to the punchline, people, just let me go. That said, unspoken goodbyes have been on my mind and in my heart for many months now. A few particular unspoken goodbyes leave me unsettled and feeling a strange sense of openness and vulnerability in my heart.

I attended the “Celebration of Life” gathering for a friend’s daughter recently. This friend is actually someone I don’t know well, but when I received news that her daughter died unexpectedly, I was overcome. It came on the heels of what was starting to look like another unspoken goodbye, and the dam burst in the middle of a workout. I let it all wash through me. I became more familiar with the possibility of losing my child (the worst fate I can imagine) and never getting to say goodbye (oh, wait this is even worse!). I attended the celebration partly as a gesture of support, one mother to another. It felt like an “I see you and I am here” offering, and she can take it or leave it. I just know that, if it were me, in spite of the likelihood that I would retreat into my internal space, I would still want to feel people near me and know that people had eyes on me.

So, if I dodge the goodbyes at the end of a lovely time with friends, why am I so present to (and bothered by) the difficulty of unspoken goodbyes? Even in the parting of ways amongst friends, there is always an assumption we will meet again; there is a knowing that in the days or weeks of silence, there is also a thread and you know exactly where that thread leads. But an unspoken goodbye… is it even a goodbye? To me, it feels like directionless silence. It is ambiguity. It is conversations never completed, questions never asked, misunderstandings never resolved and clarifications never made. It leaves closure up to me (Shit!) with a simultaneous question mark around what on earth the other party is thinking/ feeling/ doing. When ‘goodbye’ is implied, or worse- forced, rather than intentionally agreed upon, it leaves the heart unsettled. It is then up to us to reconcile the heart’s longing for comfort, certainty, and connection. It is up to us to settle the mind and bring our attention down to the source of the ache. I find it remarkable that even now, 10 years after one of my unspoken goodbyes, there is still a bit of vacancy around my heart. Does it ever settle?

At the “Celebration of Life,” I witnessed my friend gracefully move through hours of honoring her daughter’s life; she was calm, composed, and present. In those moments, her brain was not trying to make sense of the loss, she was purely in her heart-space, just BEING. Meanwhile, my eyes were welling with tears and my thoughts flitted to what I would do, or how I would be, if I had any sort of permanent goodbye with my own child. It was so hard to separate my mind from my heart, even as I listened to all of these exquisite young adults share stories of and their love for this magnificent young woman with whom they all shared an unspoken goodbye. The love in the room was not only palpable, it was contagious. Love and grief, laughter and tears; the fullness of being human.

It is said that when we are touched by grief, all the unexpressed grief we are holding in our bodies is given permission to move. I’ve had a lot of “grief” in the last many years, but I noticed in recent years that I didn’t cry as much as I would have thought. Am I maintaining my composure? I don’t think so. Perhaps I was too busy to let myself feel the depth of all that is there? I am not sure, but something has started to move. As I sat next to another friend at the celebration, she leaned over in awareness of my sniffling and tears and queried, “is it more intense with perimenopause?” A snicker burst through my tears: “YES!” These tears are absolutely perimenopause-backed tears. In fact, in the last few months, I have been getting side glances from my kid as we watch movies together because he is monitoring me for tears. I am ready to cry any moment these days. Definitely perimenopause. And I think definitely some unspoken goodbyes in there too.

I have witnessed in patients and friends over the years, and now in myself, that these years of perimenopause offer us a reconciling with all that we have held in, put up with, refrained from expressing, been unable to claim, and not known how to put down. It is a time of not caring as much, a time where unfamiliar rage leaks through, and the tears apparently flow freely and with wild abandon. The hurt, the longing, the frustrations- they all just kind of exist and I don’t care to cloak it all anymore. So, when I watch a sad scene in a movie or sit in the presence of loss, my heart invites my body to purge.

In spite of the purging… I certainly didn’t realize perimenopause was going to be featured in this piece, but there she is- AGAIN! Haha. Anyway, in spite of the release, there is a quiet reconciliation also happening with past unspoken goodbyes, current spaces of unknowing, and possible future goodbyes. I suppose this is, ironically, the nature of these transitional years, isn’t it? These are years where I actually get to speak some goodbyes: goodbye to my younger years, to the possibility of any more babies, to unearned flexibility, to blood, to having a glass of wine and not waking at 3am, to the pleasantries of maidenhood and the undying service of early parenthood…Goodbye to giving too many f*cks!

I have always been oriented toward understanding and closure. I seek reconciliation and, even in endings, I aim for at least a moment of tender-hearted presence with someone to whom I have to say goodbye. With age, however, I have slowly accumulated a few silent departures, endings that felt too open, stories that somehow still don’t seem fully written. And yet, the years go on and no next chapter takes form. “The unanswered questions lose their urgency, and the silence becomes less a wound and more a space—a space where we can choose to create meaning, to cultivate resilience, and to honor our own journey.” (Jojoy Brown) Life will ultimately be marked by a ton of unspoken goodbyes as we make our way back to the Great Unknown. We probably get to say goodbye to far fewer people than we leave unwritten chapters with. Perhaps the nature of being human is partly known in unspoken goodbyes and the accompanying heartache that reminds us we are alive.