Saying Goodbye -  Written March 3, 2025 - Posted March 5, 2025

Letting go of someone you care about is never easy.  This could be someone you have loved deeply, with whom you have shared a lifetime of memories and experiences.  This could be a valued friend from a previous point in time whose precious memory and impact on your life never dulled, but by the time you tried to bridge the chasm that often accompanies time and distance, it was too late.  It could be someone relatively new to your life with whom you felt a powerful connection, but time led to a redefining of boundaries which sadly caused permanent damage to the relationship. It might be a relative that chose to disassociate from the family following the loss of a shared loved one.  It could even be someone you met in passing at the nail salon who you immediately bonded with, confident that this was the beginning of a lasting friendship only to have that fizzle before starting.

These are just a few examples of the countless ways we may suffer the loss of someone we care about.  Each loss experience is different and personal.  Though others may empathize, the degree of pain from these losses can only be felt by and navigated by you.  Clearly the depth of connections impacts your feelings, as such you may not grieve the same for one with whom you had relatively no shared experiences. However, at the other end of the spectrum you may be dealing with the loss of someone with whom you were so deeply intertwined that it was like losing half of yourself. Some losses suffered are permanent, because of death or other circumstances, while others may offer some degree of resurrection.  One thing they all have in common is the lost opportunities.  Opportunities to laugh and experience things together, to enjoy life, try new things, new music, new adventures, new food, road trips, new memories, etc.  Together is the key word in that sentence, no new things “together,” good or bad, ever again. That’s a tough pill to swallow.  The list goes on and on but unfortunately, with loss comes the forfeited possibility of all of these things and more.  Great and small opportunities with that person are now gone forever, and that hurts.  It hurts a lot. It leaves a fresh wound in your spirit as you grieve what could have been, what you might have experienced with this person, and you suffer a tangible ache from the inside out. Well, I do.  I can only speak from my experiences, but I can personally attest that saying goodbye to people I have loved or cared about has always left a mark.

I have found that people, relationships, friendships and even brief encounters with others, all play a role in shaping who we are becoming.  Not to be too cliché, but I see life as a process, a journey, and not as a destination.  On that journey we encounter many different situations and people, some people we never actually meet but we see them from a distance or just read/learn about them, etc. and we take in their words or behaviors.  This too can affect our growth process.  We might see behaviors that we admire and try to emulate, or the opposite might be true where we see things clearly in our mind as being something we do not like or aspire for in our lives.  I’m not speaking of envy for our neighbors and what they have or don’t have.  Rather, I am saying we watch, we learn (hopefully!), we modify, we plan, we try new things, we grow (again, hopefully!) and we do our best to keep moving forward.  My goal is to be the best person I can be and that is most assuredly a process.  I can not do it alone and I have found that God aligns people in your path to help provide guidance along the way. Some play such a small role that we don’t even notice their impact at the time.  Maybe later, with the benefit of 20/20 vision when you look back you might see it, maybe not.  But others, like the ones referred to above, have a greater, more visible impact on our lives and when removed from it, for whatever reason, there is a degree of mourning for that loss.  I get it.  I feel it, and it sucks!  Even in those moments of accepting the lost opportunities, try to focus on the positive takeaways from the relationships, the things you did share together, the growth you shared together and the ways you can best honor those memories in the future.  Perhaps with time you will look back on those encounters and see how much your time together, no matter how brief, strengthened and equipped you for the next chapters and/or challenges ahead. 

Choose relationships wisely, listen to your gut, to God’s still, small voice, and try to align yourself with people who help to bring out the best possible you, while at the same time strive to be someone who helps to draw out the best possible self in others.  Relationships and friendships should be about building each other up, lifting each other up and holding each other up when you can’t do it alone.  These are not things you should have to think about or modify in order to make it fit into relationships, rather they should come naturally, from the heart.  You will know when that connection is there, and you will know when it is not.  Follow your gut, not necessarily your heart, because that thing can be fickle and easily swayed.  But wherever you choose to invest your love, your time, your attention, do so in love knowing that nothing is guaranteed and that tomorrow is not promised.  Whether this person/people are in your life for a brief moment, a season or a lifetime, love them, treat each other with kindness and respect, look for and try to draw out the positives in one another and try not to get stuck in a pattern that allows resentments to grow.  Life is too short and communication is key because one day that window might be closed and just another lost opportunity.  Make time to be present with those you love, share smiles and/or kind words with people you pass on the street and, to the best of your ability, try to be respectful and patient with all because you don’t  know what they are walking through or what, who, or how they may be grieving.  They might be wrestling with lost opportunities of their own.  You may just be that passing person in their lives that they never give a second thought to, but your impact may yet be huge to them as you reflected something positive that they wanted/needed in their lives.  

Pray for God to fill you so full of His light and His love that it overflows out of you, seeping from your pores and your mouth and your thoughts and your actions and blessing others.  Not because you want to say “look how I helped or what I did” but because God is with you and you have that precious gift of His light inside you and His abundant love to fill you up and because these gifts are meant to be shared.  Be the light for others.  Take your past experiences and lost opportunities and incorporate them into making and sharing new ones with others. 

We are all here for a greater purpose.  What’s yours?  What’s mine?  I don’t know the answer to either of those questions and in truth, we may never have the answers.  But I encourage you to keep striving to figure it out and I will work to do the same. Learning, growing and unfortunately grieving is all part of the process of life.  I know it is hard but try not to get stuck there in your grief.  Grief is a difficult season to say the least.  Take all the time you need to heal, but as much as possible, lean into God and into friends and family who help keep you afloat.  God’s loving light is a life line, take it and hold tightly onto it.  He will get you through it.  You don’t have to journey alone.  And always, even in your darkest times, try to be, and to share, the light within you.  You just never know who’s watching and taking it all in, or the impact you might have on their lives.  God is good.