“Goodbye my love, goodbye
Goodbye and au revoir
As long as you remember me
I'll never be too far
Goodbye my love, goodbye
I always will be true
So hold me in your dreams
'Til I come back to you”
-Demis Roussos, "Goodbye My Love Goodbye"
A painful but necessary part of life is saying goodbye to the people we love. This is an inevitability, as everyone we know is sure to one day die. Death, however, is not the only time we must say goodbye. There are many other events that call for this - breakups, divorces, people we love moving far, far away. These are on a smaller scale, but the result is the same - life as we know it changes overnight. It can be quite a hard pill to swallow.
We all know the feeling. It’s the feeling that something’s missing, that someone’s missing. Getting out of bed, making the morning coffee, walking out the door to work - none of it feels quite right. Demis Roussos, whose song “Goodbye My Love Goodbye” I quoted in the beginning of this Reflection, summarizes this perfectly in another one of his songs, “From Souvenirs to Souvenirs”:
From souvenirs to more souvenirs I live With days gone by when our hearts had all to give From souvenirs to more souvenirs I live With dreams you left behind That keep on turning in my mind
It’s the souvenirs - those tiny idiosyncrasies that a person leaves behind - that make saying goodbye so painful. It’s like living with a room full of ghosts that just stare at you and say nothing. Each and every one of us has been through this, and we are all familiar with the torment of living our days longing for the past. This is an unavoidable part of life and, in the words of 12 Step, “acceptance is the answer to all my problems today.”
Finding acceptance through loss is not easy, but if we look at life from a bird’s eye view, it may be a little easier to understand. See, without death (loss) there can be no life. Imagine if human beings couldn’t die? This planet would be overrun with people and we’d destroy ourselves in only a few months time. In order for people to be born, people have to die. It’s the balance of yin and yang, the mirror or duality.
What this informs me is that loss is necessary for gain. An interesting thing about our reality is that things that happen on a macrocosmic scale (i.e. birth and death) are always reflected downward towards the microcosm (human relations, culture, etc.). The principle of death giving way to life shows up everywhere - you know the cheesy 80’s-sounding slogan, “No Pain, No Gain”. Cheesy as it is, it’s true. Suffering and loss can open up new frontiers in our lives that could not have manifested otherwise. Admittedly, this can be very, very difficult to see sometimes.
I don’t want this to come across as a heartless sigma (see: lone wolf) preaching from his pulpit about how loss can always be used for “good”. Truth is, it can’t. Saying goodbye sucks, and there’s no way around that. There are always lessons to extract and new paths that emerge, but losses stay with us forever. They become scars on our hearts that do indeed make us into better versions of ourselves, but they will always sting if we poke them too hard.
There’s one interesting thing about loss that I don’t hear talked about often, and that’s the factor of the unknown. We don’t know what happens after we die (we can certainly give our best guesses, but we will never actually know), so we don’t know if we will see our loved ones again. I lean towards the belief that we will, but maybe not in the way we think. Regardless, this unknown is reflected in all types of loss. We don’t know if the life we once knew will eventually come back around again. That’s a matter of faith - if the universe wants that for us, it will bring it back when we are ready. Otherwise, we must respect The Way and move towards our new future. Clinging to a past that has absolutely no future is a recipe for disaster - I know from painful personal experience.
I’m not going to give any advice on how to say goodbye or how to mourn a loss. What I am going to say is you’re not alone, and I feel for you deeply. Some of the greatest artists of history have produced their greatest works from this type of experience, so you’re in good company. If you’re in the mood for a cry, throw on some Demis Roussos and let it rip. Sometimes, that’s the best we’ve got.