The Official Goodbye...

My dad’s service is today.  The official goodbye.  Feels final.  And permanent.  And forever.  And I suppose it is all of those things.  Death, at least as far as we know it, is permanent.  Perhaps once we walk through that final gate, we will know more, or come to understand death better. Until then, we are left to grapple with the loss, sadness and grief as best we can.

And I will endeavor to do my best today.  To send my dad off to the hereafter with laughter, tears and love.  I can do that.  What else could I do?

I am not worried or too stressed.  This is part of living.  It is an honor of living, actually. To be present and stalwart, to attend lovingly to the goodbye.

And even though today will be the official goodbye, I believe for all the days of the rest of my life, I will be saying goodbye to my dad.  I believe that is what grief is.  A never ending discussion and negotiation of new and varying levels of goodbye.

I used to refuse to say goodbye to anyone.  I would say instead, “Fare thee well...”  Mostly because I am dramatic and weird.  But I have learned that saying goodbye is a skill that life hones and develops and curates within a living soul.  The ability to show up and release those people, jobs, places and things that are no longer good for you, or cannot go with you where you must go next.  Life is an unending process of saying goodbye:  to people we love, to people we outgrow, to people who cannot meet us where we are.  Saying goodbye, as it turns out, is just another aspect and part of living.  And I can see now, all those years I refused to say the word, did not help me grow in any kind of capacity.  It just held me stuck, pinned to a place where my life was replete with hardship, pain and a great many individuals that made my life so much worse.

Living sober has gifted me the ability to walk through and away from things and beings that no longer fit the version of me I show up as today.  I do my level best to not cling to things and people that life is very clearly demonstrating to me it is trying to remove.  Instead, I attempt to awaken each day and hold out my hands, to watch, pay attention to what alights on my open palm.  Some people are just brief touchdowns, barely there in my outstretched palm to leave any impression at all.  Then there are others whose presence weighs heavy on my hand.  I spent a very long time in my life attempting to clutch at those I wanted to remain, who were, in fact, destined to go.

I do not do that anymore.  I do not hold things to me, or people, who are not meant for me.  I will never be able to tell which ones are lasting and which ones are not.  I must stay current, and in the present moment, if I am to ever have a prayer of living the life that is meant for me.  I have and likely always will pick all the wrong things and people for all the wrong reasons.  Trauma is a great selector of things that create a never ending recurrence of the same lesson disguised as something much more palatable and enjoyable, but upon more careful examination, is just the same traumatic response playing out over and over and over once more.

Today I pay attention as to who comes to me.  And I similarly do my best to allow them to go when their time appears.  I can no more hold you to me than I can breathe life back into my father’s existence.

He was here.  He lived a pretty miraculous and daring life.  It was filled with grand heroics.  It was filled with a great deal of sadness.  It was filled with dysfunction and pain.  It was filled with so much love and laughter and I know today, he did his absolute best to live his life, broken as he was, as we all are, in a way and manner that was graceful and dignified.

I will miss him.  I do miss him.  And I suppose I will miss him for the rest of my days.  And I know, sometimes, like today, the pain of the loss of him will be acute, cutting and have this hollowing out characteristic.  But that is just a moment.  And it shall pass.  And I will be granted many more moments when missing him will feel lighter and be filled with laughter and fond remembrance.

Saying goodbye is one of the great lessons of our existence.  From the moment we meet a person, life is preparing us, in small and large ways, to move forward without them at some point.  None of us get to hold those we love dearly forever.  Children grow up and move away.  Relationships and marriages end.  People and pets die and pass away.  In every welcome, there is an inherent goodbye that shall come at some perhaps distant point in our future.  And sometimes the need for goodbye comes much sooner than we would like...

Today, I am honored to speak to the man my dad was to me.  How he showed up.  How he lived.  And to share the love and joy and humor that was woven so deeply into the fiber of his being.  And even as I say goodbye, that fiber and sinew of his existence is preserved as it is inextricably intermingled with my own existence.

Fare thee well, is not a proper send off.  Goodbye is a much more fitting salutation for a life well lived.  I love you Dad.  May you rest easy knowing we miss you, we love you and you were so important to us all that you will never, ever be forgotten.

Goodbye, Dad.

Again, still...