Journal of Sacred Work

"And presently, she rises. Though in pain/ You let her leave – the loved one always leaves." – James Merrill

   My wife and I are the kind of sentimentalists that sometimes say goodbye to hotel rooms we've stayed in or to apartments we've rented. For us, it's about cherishing and respecting places where we've had a good experience. Or maybe we're just silly romantics. Of course, saying goodbye to our children over and over through the years has often been heart-rending.

   That is why, as autumn edges near, I think of another kind of goodbye, a kind of dying that accompanies the falling leaves. It is the departure of children for college.

   It's a happy event, of course. We want our children to be independent and strong as well as loving. After all, we don't want them to stay overly dependent, tethered to us all of their lives, do we? And, college is what we have nudged them to study for, right?

  But, the joys of college do not, of course, dissolve the pain we feel when we say goodbye. It's hard to watch our daughters or sons turn their eyes away from us to face the new world of college or a military assignment or marriage or something else that draws them away.  

   My wife wrote a poem about this once. It was about our own son's departure on a summer trip. "Goodbye, you who are always leaving me…," the poem began.

   We weave bonds of love, close relationships, only to see the bonds torn and rewoven into another, sometimes richer tapestry – one that holds all the threads of our memories. 

   Consider leave-taking that happens regularly between hospice caregivers and patients. Dying is the ultimate goodbye. At hospices, everybody understands this. Still, the extended dying process is often a time of deep intimacy and caregivers are a significant part of this. This is why, in hospice care, leadership has an even higher calling to take care of the people who are taking care of people. For hospice caregivers often begin to feel like family to their patients and grieve with them as the patient departs. With each death, there is a rending and then, hopefully, a healing.

   We will forever be saying, "Goodbye" to someone that is leaving. I have said goodbyes over and over to our our son as he headed off to camp at age 10, returning a month later already changed; to our daughter, on her very first day of kindergarten. Recorded faithfully on my Super-8 movie camera is her smiling, 5-year-old face as she waves happily at me. She is now thirty-seven and a mother herself, already having trouble absorbing that her 20-month-old will, if things go well, one day head off to college. Each departure is a kind of dying, a sunset setting on one chapter of our lives. 

   Finally, there is the good news. There is the sunrise of new chapters. Many farewells are followed by homecomings – Parents welcoming children home, nurses welcoming new patients. These welcomes are important because we know this is what Love is about – a holding on, a letting go, and, perhaps, a return or the opening of a new page in our life story.

   Somehow, although we know things are never the same, we create the illusion that our children will always be with us or that maybe the patient won't die. When the end of this phase occurs, we struggle to hold on or, more likely, we simply mourn the passing as if standing on the shore waving to the sails of a departing ship.

   Each of us ages into a new stage in our lives all the time - each chapter filled with not only hellos and goodbyes, but with the experience that makes greetings and goodbyes so difficult, and such a rich part of our lives. It is our caring which weaves gold into ordinary fabric.   

   How do leave-takings affect you in your work as a caregiver?

-Erie Chapman