The Good Goodbye

Some of you may be familiar with the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, a vast compendium of wisdom both conventional and un-. In it, you may find words, phrases, paragraphs in verse metered and free, prose, song and languages ancient and modern. Witticisms, pronouncements, orations and musings from every walk of life, thinkers alive or long dead—in other words, there’s a heck of a lot in there. But there are no thoughtful, kind or even sentimental passages addressing the theme of goodbyes. There are only a few references to goodbye at all and all of them are strange, along the lines of the following:

Good-bye-ee! - Good-bye-ee!
Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee.
Tho' it's hard to part, I know,
I'll be tickled to death to go.
Don't cry-ee - don't sigh-ee!
There's a silver lining in the sky-ee!
Bonsoir old thing! Cheerio! Chin-chin!
Nahpoo! Toodle-oo! Good-bye-ee!

It’s from a 1915 song by British songwriters R. P. Weston and Bert Lee. The verse doesn’t just present the traditional chin-up, stoic British mentality, it also reflects the common reality that a lot of people, perhaps most people, really struggle with how to say goodbye.

We can express ourselves at least somewhat readily about love, lost love, failure, living, dying, even many kinds of ecstasy, pain and suffering. There’s a lot of literature, stories and personal accounts that show people can generally do a decent job of expressing these deep experiences, even though they’re not simple or easy to articulate, even when they’re in the context of a relationship and so not just about one person. But goodbye is maybe one of the hardest dynamics to address in human relationship and experience. It’s about acknowledging an ending and there is so much tied up in endings—attachment, loss, uncertain prospects, sorrow, or resentment, loneliness or desperation or fear. In almost any kind of relationship, beginnings are relatively easy to launch into, and middles have their own momentum; being in the middle of an experience just carries us along with it, often enough. But goodbyes are harder, and with all those dynamics complicating our thinking and feeling, it’s testing, but perhaps all the more important, to say goodbye properly. Many of us have probably had that experience, perhaps many experiences, of recognizing the occasion of an important goodbye and feeling how unprepared we were to play our part in it—because it required more honesty or vulnerability or generosity or clarity or calm than we possessed, at least in the moment.

Society doesn’t do much to help us rise to those moments, hard as they can be and much as they can matter. Really, the only kind of goodbyes that society pays any attention to are the final goodbyes that are part of funerary and memorial traditions—and too often even those are too constrained by ritual and custom to really meet the needs and reality of the person who has died and the people who remain to grieve and honor them. There are so many other endings we never meet with the kind of rituals and respect they deserve—that might even help us do them better: divorce, retirement, significant departures, moves, job changes, even the growing up and leaving of children from the home.

But instead, too often, goodbyes are often underplayed or haphazard. In so many stories, legends, songs, books, films, about evil and good, life, love, existence, might, courage, self-sacrifice, devotion and transformation, goodbye plays a role. Frequently along the way there is a lot of bonding between characters. And at the ends of the stories, come the goodbyes but often these are the briefest elements in the stories, they are even cursory. The inadequacy of a goodbye sometimes even seems to be meant to honor how much the goodbye should mean, because hellos can go on for pages, but goodbyes are often a sentence or less.

This is the reason I never liked the song “Puff the Magic Dragon.” I hate
the way Jackie Paper simply stops coming one day, with never a goodbye. In fact, when I was little, I thought Jackie Paper had died, especially because of that line “Dragons live forever, but not so little boys...”. But Jackie Paper doesn’t die, he lives and just stops coming, and Puff's green scales fall like rain and he loses his mighty roar and sadly slips into his cave. I've never forgiven Jackie Paper.

There are some goodbyes which are more comprehensive, even when as much goes unsaid as said. Think about the ones you think are good ones. One of my favorites is the one in the film Casablanca. That goodbye is a good example because there is actually a lot more said than “We’ll always have Paris.” You can debate whether it's an entirely fair goodbye, with Rick being high-handed about what’s right for Ilsa in her life and what's not, but any way you slice it, it's still a great goodbye. Which brings me to my point: What comprises a good goodbye?

Now, it is important to live in the moment as Emerson advocates in our
reading earlier, but it is also crucial, especially regarding goodbyes, to
live with a sense of personal history, to live with a commitment to
remembrance whereby we carry each other through life and beyond even death, to be willing to say goodbye without cutting out the caring which makes goodbyes poignant and emotional. On the other hand, we do have to try to say our goodbyes without being so overwhelmed by the poignancy that we become paralyzed or maudlin, because these actually detract from a goodbye, making it trite or worse, sadly empty. If there’s a relationship or person or experience or life that deserves a goodbye from us at all, it deserves that goodbye to be real, reflective of the feeling and experience that give rise to the need for a goodbye in the first place.

So what would a good goodbye look like? Across all the many kinds of goodbyes we say in a life, are there common qualities we could call on or strive for in saying farewell to a time, a place, a person, a life? Well, there can or maybe should be more included, but I believe a good goodbye has to include five essential elements. These are: reminiscence, acknowledgement of feeling, praise, a promise, and benediction.

Reminiscence reminds us of why we need to say goodbye at all. Reviewing what has happened, how things began, and developed, is important in honoring the span of experience, and the impact that has been part of the experience.

Acknowledging emotion makes the connection between the people clear and honest. This mean not only honoring the reality of the emotion that is current—which is usually at least partly grief, maybe complex with anger or guilt or resentment—but also the emotion that has been—often the good stuff such as excitement, love, joy, fulfillment or hope or contentment have been present along the way.

Praise. Well, the people and places and times we care about deserve the praise that is implicit in our feelings for them, especially when we are in the process of summing up our relationship to them. What impacts us deeply does and should command our respect and honor, and that honor ought to have the form of words, to be explicit, especially at a time of ending.

Promise is connected to reminiscence and caring and depends particularly on the circumstances of the goodbye. Perhaps it is that we won’t forget what we shared with someone, or that we will want to stay connected to them, perhaps it is that we will forgive them or that we will continue what we began with them. Whatsoever it may be, the appropriate promise arises out of our sentiments and needs. Like praise, the promise deserves to be said, not only so that the future might honor and learn from the past, but also so that we may live as integrated and authentic people and souls.

Benediction, the last component, is commonly confused with the whole shebang. The word 'Good-bye' is in fact a benediction, and it's surely crucial, but it isn’t the whole deal. (Consider a current psycho-therapeutic theory holds that there should be six weeks of goodbye-processing between people closely involved with each other, even - but not only - in a professional relationship such as that between a therapist and patient.) Benediction, which comes from the Latin for uttering a good thing, is the act of blessing, often associated through Christian liturgical tradition, to a greeting or more often closing salutation. So the benediction is where good wishes and God usually come into a goodbye, in phrases from cultures and languages around the world: Adieu, Vaya con Dios, Shalom, Salaam Aleikum, Na pas sto kalo, Go with God, Godspeed, God keep you, God be with you. The benediction puts the seal on the goodbye.

I have preached prototypes of this sermon before, when I was finishing my ministry at other congregations, the first of which was First Parish in Lexington, Massachusetts. A this point in those sermons, I went on to Reminisce, Acknowledge, Praise, Promise and Benedict. This is the first time I’ve revised it and preached it not as part of saying goodbye to a church and I have to say it makes it a lot more joyful to preach, which speaks to that saying goodbye is tough dynamic I was mentioning earlier. I am preaching it this morning because a parishioner and I were talking about the topic and she said pointed out that goodbye is an ongoing dynamic in life and that if I waited until I was, if ever, leaving this congregation, it would likely be such a long time from now that it would be too late for many opportunities that it might help with between now and then.

We were talking about it in the first place because I had just learned that a close friend of mine, who was came for that first sermon in Lexington, has been using it in his medical practice ever since with patients and with his staff. He finds that the model eases his and his staff’s work with patients, both those who are lastingly released after a significant hospitalization, and with patients who have a terminal illness. According to my friend, Dr. Gavi, presenting the model as an option for the families of terminal patients has also helped many of them find ways to begin goodbyes that feel almost impossible to do, and even helped focus the thinking and decision-making of families faced with end-of-life decisions. It doesn’t make decisions easier, but it seems to make them clearer.

Having a few years of experience with the model, he asked me to collaborate with him in writing a paper and then a presentation, maybe later a book—about how these elements fit, why they matter, and how they can help—particularly, but not only, in a clinical setting. It was, of course, exciting to learn that a private system I’d conceived initially as part of leaving a loved church had such a broad and different application than I’d ever considered. But this medical aspect, only points again to that initial point—that how we say goodbye really matters, and that too often when it matters most, we are most challenged to do right by the person or people or circumstance.

There is more we could do—develop rituals in this area for partings, departures, endings, divorces, passages. Maybe some of us will explore those options. But in the meantime, goodbye, good old, terrible old, mundane and important goodbyes will be upon us soon, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. Reminiscence, acknowledgement of feeling, praise, a promise, and benediction may not fit the bill for all of us—we may need to tweak or exchange or drastically revise that prescription to make it work for us or our situation… but don’t let those endings, and partings pass without what you know they’re due from you. We live though we know we will die, and we love, though we know that life may part us and that death certainly will. These truths are eternal—let our endings as well as any other part of our living, honor how much each life matters among us.

Amen.

Reading 556 - Emerson, These Roses