Saying goodbye

Goodbyes can be frightening when they hold the possibility of prolonged separation and being forgotten.

You don’t have to be on your deathbed to feel that.

I can see it already in my two year old grandson, Eli Benson.

I let him drive my car. Don’t worry, he doesn't really drive. But don’t tell him because he thinks he does. Eli meets me at the front door with determined eyes and declares, “Eli drive Poppop’s vroom vroom.”

I stand him in my lap while he leans forward and puts his hands on the wheel. It’s okay, my hands are on the wheel too, and we stay on our quiet, dead end residential road. Our speed limit is 3 m.p.h. For entertainment we like to roll the windows down and turn the volume up on the radio. Then we bee bop to the beat of rock n’roll as we cruise down the road. Jack Kerouac has nothing on us.

Oops, I forgot one important detail.

Eli grins from the car window to his Gigi, Mom and Dad and proudly shouts, “bye,” drawing the word into two syllables, “ba-i.”

He repeats it several times, as if to say, “I’m not kidding. I really am saying good-bye. I’m a big boy now.”

Then it happens.

Eli sticks his head out the window and cranes his neck, peering back as Gigi, Mom and Dad dwindle into specks.

As if the impact of that word, “bye” suddenly dawns on him, he turns to me with furrowed brow and whispers, “Go back.”

It’s the fear of goodbye: He doesn't want to be separated or forgotten.

And neither do you.

Eli doesn't understand we will be reunited in just a few minutes; his concept of time doesn't extend beyond “now.”

We don’t like being apart from those we love, and seeing them recede in the distance brings with it the lonely awareness that a permanent separation is a possibility, if not now---someday.

You want to reach out and take them back in, turn the car around and “go back.”

But goodbyes, as painful as they can be, are also necessary if we are to move on along life’s road.

Baylor University, in Waco, Texas, where I went to college, was a 5 hour drive from my home, Altus, Oklahoma. On those rare occasions when I would come back for the weekend, I would hang around and hang around on Sunday afternoon before finally leaving. Lori, my high school girlfriend, would be there, moping around, daubing her wet eyes. It was like the trail of tears at our house.

On one of those drawn out occasions that lasted half the afternoon, my granddad, perhaps a tad irritated because my failure to exit was cutting into his afternoon nap time, pulled me aside.

“Son,” he said, “just leave.”

I didn't want to hear that, but he was right. Sometimes you just have to leave.

If we never leave, at least for a while, we are apt to miss the challenges that spur us to grow.

As someone said, “He who never leaves home thinks Mama is the only cook.”

And then there is that final goodbye, the one we dread the most. All the others are dress rehearsals for this one. And there is no escaping it.

We’re like the prisoner in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, watching as first the pendulum and then the pit threaten us. Only there is no General Lasalle and the French Army to rescue us.

We are bound to tumble in.

But succumbing to the final goodbye doesn't have to be like descending into a pit or being tortured by a swinging pendulum. It can be a warm welcome from the One who lovingly awaits us there in the Great Beyond.

I’m like Eli; I know very little about what time is, so I too want to “go back,” chaffing at the thought of “goodbye.”

After that last goodbye we are “here,” apart, and then “there,” reunited.

And how long is that, really?

The final goodbye can be the first greeting at the entrance of a joyful Forever.

After all, the origin of the word, “goodbye” is “God be with you.”

And I believe he is.

In each goodbye.

From the one with a child in the car.

To the last one on that road to the Everlasting Tomorrow.