Goodbyes… never easy

You’d think I’d be better at this by now…

Having lived overseas for a number of years, there have been a LOT of people we’ve said goodbye to. I remember one time when we were living in Vienna, Austria — where it seemed a revolving door of hellos and goodbyes occurred because so many in the expat community were there for 2-3 years max — it dawned on me that I had developed a strange coping mechanism whenever a friend said they were going to move…

I would start withdrawing. Avoid getting together. Avoid revisiting all the memories from our shared experiences. I called it getting “weird.” But actually, it was a way of building a wall of protection around my fragile heart. An attempt to isolate myself from one more disappointment. An attempt to protect myself from the emptiness, the pain that my friend’s absence would bring. The hole in my heart couldn’t be filled by the next newcomer who came to town. And so I began to not even WANT to start new relationships as a way of preventing what would inevitably come to pass.

NOT a healthy way to deal with things!

After this eureka moment of identifying my ineffective coping strategy, more opportunities presented themselves for me to do things differently. Yep, it’s inevitable … but not just for those of us living overseas. People come and go in any community, anywhere on the globe! Our lives ebb and flow with changes in geography, job, season of life (think of kids and how the various stages from birth to out-of-the-home influence us!). Death itself is the final goodbye, and so ample opportunities to learn how to say goodbye abound.

And so when the time came for us to move from Europe — our home for 34 years — to Asia, I told those I was closest to (including our daughter, who would be remaining in Romania, where she had lived since she was 12 years old — and still lives!) about my tendency to get “weird.” I told them that I might start withdrawing. That I might avoid getting together. That I might say things that seemed out of character. That I probably would be more emotional, irritable, unpredictable. And I asked them to PLEASE say something to me, to bring this “weirdness” to my attention so that I wouldn’t cut them out of my life. This was when I needed them the most, even though everything about me was giving a different message. I also told them I’d bring it to their attention — with their permission — if I began to feel they were doing the same thing to me.

Wow! What a help that was — for all involved! It even opened up some opportunities for gut-level communication that was hard, but so very needed.

Fast forward to last week…

I had known my friend Marcia was going to be moving this summer. My husband and I had been in the States for two months, and so our first Sunday back home we got together with Marcia and her husband — naively acting as though this was a normal thing, not one of our last in-person times. A few weeks later we got together again…

… and now the “weirdness” set in. I felt like a zombie when we were together. More like an outsider than a participant in conversations. When I realized what I was doing, I shared my heart with them. What a relief to be able to talk about it and to also have the opportunity to share with them special memories of our times together, how they had impacted and influenced my life, what I appreciated about them. Things I needed to say, wanted to say… and yet had felt stymied when the “weirdness” set in.

The word Romanians use for goodbye is “La revedere.” Literally, to see again. Germans have a similar word, “Auf Wiedersehen.” Until we meet again. I like these much better than goodbye, which sounds so final!

As a Christ follower, there is truth in the fact that no matter what the future holds I will be seeing Marcia and her husband again… if not on this earth, someday in heaven. That softens the leave-taking that will occur tonight when we see them off at the airport. And knowing this is what helps me to have joy in the journey of this thing called “Life!”