No, don't let the title fool you, I am not saying good-bye. Actually, I have never really said good-bye, I realized today. At least not in the permanent sense, in person, to someone who can hear me. All of my family members who have passed away, did so unexpectedly, without warning. So I have never experienced the process of saying good-bye to someone who is not expected to live much longer.
A friend of mine lost his wife a couple hours ago. It was not unexpected, but no less tragic. She leaves behind a husband and four young children, after a year-long battle with various forms of cancer. She isn't someone I was particularly close to, but her husband had a significant impact on my spiritual development. The aspect of all of this that stands out to me the most is that her family has known this was coming for the last month. So they took a vacation last week, to build positive happy memories together. Anything related to someone knowingly facing the last few days of their life must be pretty intense. But that was part of their process of saying good-bye.
The extremity of that potential situation is what brought to my attention the fact that I have never dealt with anything quite like that. The two closest times, were with the passing of my grandmother and my mom. My grandmother survived for two weeks after having a stroke, but since she never regained consciousness, there was never that opportunity to say good-bye. It is impossible to know whether she could still hear people around her, but most of the intensity comes relating to the perspective of the one facing death. The older someone is when they pass away, the less intense it usually is. Death is expected to happen eventually, and they have less to lose, having expended their potential in a full life.
In the case with my mom, technically I did have the chance to say good-bye. I think my exact words were "see you later," or possibly, "see you tomorrow." She was being kept in the hospital for observation, and was expected to be released the following morning, since they couldn't find anything wrong with her. And I did say good-bye to her the following morning as well, but she couldn’t hear me at that point. I only spent one day at the hospital with her in ICU, not knowing what (if anything) was wrong, and that was a pretty tough experience. I can't imagine doing that on and off for a year, with frequently more negative prognosis’s. I think I prefer things like that happening without warning, and being over quickly. I may have inherited that view from my Mom, because I know she felt that way, even about her own potential death.
A lot of people don’t like saying good-bye, even in a short-term sense, whether it is saying good-bye to everyone at camp at the end of a summer, or a wife watching her husband setting out on deployment. This is drawn out even further if departure is somehow delayed. I don’t see those extensions as painful so much as awkward. I don’t want to miss saying good-bye to someone, but I also don’t like continuing to run into them for another couple hours if schedules are loose in that regard. Other people cope by completely avoiding the good-bye process, and treating it the same as if they were heading out to lunch, and would be back in an hour. I think that might be a bit extreme, and that there is some value in directly acknowledging that a person will be missed.
I was talking about the more permanent situations with a friend of mine this afternoon, and she said that she preferred the long, drawn-out, intense, tearful good-bye to the unexpected death. Having experienced both ways, she is qualified to have that opinion. I have never dealt with the scenario of having warning of someone's impending death, but the idea doesn't seem appealing. Now maybe that is just because I am scared of the unknown, and while I am fine with regular good-byes, I have never dealt with acknowledging something like that. But I know I have survived dealing with unexpected deaths, and I feel like I prefer it that way. Regardless of whether or not someone has a terminal illness, each time you see them could potentially be the last. Tragic as those types of circumstances are, it is easy to see how God can use them to give the rest of us perspective on our daily "struggles" and help us appreciate the presence of those he has placed around us.
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