How Do I Say Goodbye?

I don’t think I can bear one more parting…

How do you say goodbye to the people, animals, and places you have come to love? How do you live without them?

I’ve asked myself this a thousand times. On my last day of school in Los Angeles, where I had grown up, my best friend, Aubrey, ran out to the parking lot to greet me, threw her arms around me and cried.

“This is the last time we’ll be in class together.”

I was a little bit excited about our big move, absolutely burnt out on L.A. culture even at the tender age of 11, but I couldn’t imagine not seeing Aubrey every day, as I had for the previous two years. (Though little did I know then, she would remain my friend all these years later.)

I soon learned that life was strewn with sad partings.

We lost pets. Friends. My grandfather.

Then the biggest blow came the next year, when my beloved Uncle Andrew died at the age of 49. He literally collapsed while mowing his lawn and as soon as the paramedics loaded him into the ambulance to take him to the morgue, our phone was ringing with the news.

He was, in many ways, a best friend to all seven of his nieces and nephews, and none of us could fathom this world without him in it.

“My boy is gone,” my implacably hard grandfather said, in a cracking voice. It was the day before the funeral, and we were sitting together in his kitchen in Los Angeles. “How do you say goodbye?”

I had no answer and just sat there crying.

It is Labor Day weekend 2020. My sister and her family are moving 200 miles away on October 2nd. I’m keenly aware of this as I sit in her house, spending as much time as I can with the kids before the big day.

The older kids want to have a Jurassic Park marathon, but it’s getting late. My sister says, “Just stay the night, if you want. You can sleep in Keira’s bed.”

So we stay up late watching people run from dinosaurs. Finn, the future paleontologist, interjects with random facts about prehistoric life. Ben, the oldest, is sitting in his teenager slump, cracking a joke every few minutes. Kai, the sarcastic ten-year-old, keeps looking at me and rolling his eye at his brother’s jokes and telling me what he would do if he was stuck in a park with dinosaurs running wild.

All I can think of is the fact that this might be the last sleepover in that house that we ever have. Or at the very least, one of the last. It’s already different, since everything has been packed away and half the furniture has been sold. It feels like a hotel.

How many times have I sat on that couch in the darkness, watching movies with those kids? How many times did I sit there reading while I was babysitting, only to be joined by one of them when they had a bad dream and needed someone to sit with?

We’ll have sleepovers again, it’s true. But somewhere else.

It’s hard to imagine.

It was late autumn when my ex walked away from our relationship. It happened so fast, it felt like I’d been punched in the gut. Yet, also…it was as if he’d been hinting at it for the previous seven years and I just hadn’t paid attention.

How was I going to live without him? I honestly didn’t believe I could.

I remember that Saturday that he left so vividly. When I arrived home, the sound of the door closing echoed in the half-empty living room. All his stuff was gone.

I walked into the room that he’d called his man cave and found it completely empty. Nothing inside. Nothing on the walls. No curtains. Not even a ballpoint pen left behind.

I sank to the floor next to where my dog was sitting and sobbed.

I loved him so much. How could I could I say goodbye? How could I survive that loss?

How could I go on one more step?

This is such a short window of time I have. I’m staying in quarantine, only seeing the kids so I can hug them and cuddle with Baby Alex (who is not such a baby anymore). But I’m going to have to break quarantine soon. My brother’s baby is about to have her first birthday and I can’t play favorites and skip that…even though I confess I want to.

Honestly…I think I might stay in quarantine indefinitely if it meant I got to be with Alex.

When he gets up from his naps, he clings to me so hard, it’s comical. When my arm gets tired and I need to shift his weight, he digs his fingers into my arm, a silent reproach. I can almost hear him thinking, “Don’t even try to put me down.”

Maybe he doesn’t realize that I wish I could hold on to him forever.

“It’ll be okay,” Kai said at dinner the other day. “It’s almost Christmas. We always have Christmas at Ya-Ya’s house. We’ll all get to be together soon, even after we move.”

“Buddy,” I reminded him, a pained expression on my face. “You guys can’t go over to Ya-Ya’s right now, remember? Because of the virus. She’s high-risk. We won’t be able to have Christmas like we normally do.”

Kai stared at me in shock.

Finn looked up from his plate. “What are we gonna do for Christmas, then?”

“When are we all gonna be together again?” Kai echoed, an even bigger question.

I tried to look hopeful, but barely got out my answer before my voice cracked. “I don’t know.”

My dog died a few months after my ex left. I knew it was coming. He had been in poor health for months and my ex’s departure was the end for him.

Even though the dog belonged to me and had been with me since he was a puppy, he adored my ex. After my ex moved out, the dog waited by the door every single day, as if certain his beloved human daddy would eventually come home.

I think both of us realized early the next spring that “daddy” was never going to come home.

I would lie on the living room floor with my dog for hours when I got home from work each day. He had gotten so weak, so frail.

“I know you have to leave me,” I’d whisper, “but I don’t want you to. I can’t make it on my own.”

I know he tried to rally for me. I know he knew how much I needed him. But there’s only so much a faithful dog can do in the face of kidney failure and old age.

When I woke up one day to find that he had passed in the night, I laid next to him again, crying, begging him to come back to me. I genuinely, honestly, truly did not think I could handle the loss.

My brother dug a grave for him at my mother’s ranch, next to their own dog, who had also just passed away. We had adopted them together from the local shelter, where they had been “cage mates.”

I jumped into the grave to pet him one last time before my brother covered him with dirt, but I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t climb out. I couldn’t leave my baby there in the ground.

My mom cried and reached her hand out and begged me to climb out. “Please,” she said. “You can’t make him come back.”

Finally, I took her hand and let her pull me out of the grave and I collapsed on the ground, weeping, listening to the sound of my brother’s shovel scraping into the dirt over and over again.

“I don’t want to say goodbye,” I wailed.

Baby Alex used to cry when I left after a visit. It broke my heart.

How can I describe how much I love him? How much I wish…is it okay to say this?…that he was my baby? How much I wish I could take him with me everywhere I go?

But I can’t.

So I would leave and he would cry.

But now, after this past week of spending time with the kids, now he gets angry, instead. There’s some comfort in this — I no longer feel like my heart is breaking when I leave because he’s not crying and reaching for me.

But I also know him. I know that his anger is often an expression of emotional pain.

When he looked at me today as I was slinging my purse over my shoulder, he pressed his lips together and ran out of the room. I waited to see if he would come back and hug me, like he usually does, but when he reentered the room, he only scowled at me, again.

What will happen when they get into the car and drive away and I’m just a figure waving goodbye on the sidewalk? What will happen when a couple months go by and I haven’t come by for a visit?

Will he think I don’t love him anymore? Will he forget me?

Will anything be the same when I see him again?

How can I live without him? Without any of them? They will not be gone, of course. I won’t truly lose them. But I will lose the life that we’ve had together for the past 14 years. That will be gone forever.

And I will lose the way Baby Alex and I have spent time together for the past year. I’ll never have that kind of access to him again.

I know that I’ll survive, because I have survived before. But the world lost some color after my uncle died. After my boyfriend left. After my dog passed away.

What will I do without my little ones? Without my Alex? Without his little fingers digging into my arm, or his little laugh when I pretend to take a bite out of him?

How do I say goodbye?

© Yael Wolfe 2020

Love, family, grief, fear: