Nobody Knows How to Say Goodbye

It's 3am and the Lumineers keep pulling me out of sleep. Expect this blog to be as disjointed as my awakenings.

Nobody knows how to say goodbye

It seems so easy 'til you try

Then the moment's passed you by

Nobody knows how to say goodbye

I know (and adore) a young woman who's experiencing heartbreak for the first time. My mom would say that it's not the hole a person leaves in your life that strikes the deepest. It's the loss of dreams.

Nobody knows how to get back home

And we set out so long ago

Searched the heavens and the Earth below

Nobody knows how to get back home

I remember sitting in the gym at Drager Middle School, eating lunch. It was a regular day, but this one stands out because I thought the pain of my parents’ divorce might kill me. I chewed my ham and cheese sandwich and for some reason focused on the wooden pegs mounted to the wall. Older gyms have all sorts of built in equipment. I knew what it was but had never seen it used.

A child was meant to grab a peg in each hand and pull themselves upward by reaching one arm at a time to place a peg in the next higher hole. From the floor, the empty slots look predictable but once in motion, they aren’t so obvious. A fatigued mind and body might question the distance to, or even the existence of, the next point of rest.

Isn’t this just like grief?

Through the darkness to the dawn

And when I looked back you were gone

Heard your voice leading me on

Through the darkness to the dawn

A therapist once told me that Elizabeth Kubler Ross incompletely named the fifth stage of grief. I was healing from an act of violence and it wasn't okay with me that it had happened. I prepared myself to be an outlier: the person denied wholeness due to circumstance.

“I think many of us would be better off if Kubler Ross called that last stage “Accommodation,” she told me. "Some things will never be alright. We can find a way, though, to fit the fact of them into our lives. The path forward is to make space for acknowledgement.”

In the decades since, I think I’ve achieved acceptance, but for a long time, I couldn’t reach for that peg. The idea of accommodation allowed me to exist and heal, and also to manage the anger over what I’d survived.

Love is deep as the road is long

And moves my feet to carry on

Beats my heart when you are gone

Love is deep as the road is long

When my Aunt Fran died, my little boy cried out in anguish, “What is this? I never want to feel like this again.” I couldn’t hug his pain away and I knew not to try. The best I could do was be his companion; a traveler just a little further down the trail who at least knew the name of the woods we’d entered. I saw it on the horizon. He was dropped into it in the middle of the night.

He understands now that the depth of grief's anguish reflects the magnitude of the connection to the person we've lost. It’s not a price as much as a privilege to feel the ripples of love and loss for the rest of our lives. In those early moments, though, what do we do when the person who offered comfort is the one whose physical form we are letting go?

.

Nobody knows how the story ends

Live the day, do what you can

This is only where it began

Nobody knows how the story ends

Nobody knows how the story ends

This is the verse that has me awake tonight. For some time, I’ve grieved the fact that motherhood isn’t what I thought it would be. It hasn’t gone as promised. To be clear, it was my younger self who made the guarantees.

The pandemic brought struggles and my need to fix my now-teen son’s pain only compounded it. Where I once knew to hold space, I charged in weilding a wooden sword and I bashed everyone with its bluntness.

“What is this?" I cried. "I never want to feel like this again.”

It turns out not all woods are the same and we were both dropped in during the dead of night. I forgot that I was a traveller and I grasped at a role never intended for me.

Tonight, I find myself dreading the holidays and the grief stage called bargaining rapid cycles between what they could have/should look like and reality.

Oh, the death of dreams.

Women with children are shown two choices. We are holiday moms or sad ladies.

I find myself bearing down for what’s to come. I can’t even reach up for the pegs above my head. I don’t know how to climb any more and I don’t want to figure it out. The woods are dark and I don’t want to go in. I’m experiencing all the metaphors, it's 3am, and I’m wide awake.

There has to be a third choice.

It can’t just be pumpkins, turkey and wrapping paper vs. numbness, tears and bed. I choose to feel the grief. I know it’s the way through.

So, maybe I do know how to say goodbye.

Even when I don't want to.

NOTE: I have published this in my education blog because grief is universal. My healing and understanding makes me of service to my students. Many come to us wearing, hiding, and/or carrying profound grief.

May our classrooms offer respite in their journey through the woods.