Parting: What If He Says Goodbye?

Bid him farewell and wish him well. Life is a journey. As we travel along, we can draw strength in knowing that all that we have met in our journey make up part of who we are that we can never lose.

“Parting is such a sweet sorrow.” This is Juliet's famous oxymoron in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. It combined the contradictory sensations of pleasure and pain. In Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, Richard Bach wrote:
Don’t be dismayed at goodbyes.
A farewell is necessary before you can meet again.
And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.

What if he says goodbye? Bid him farewell and wish him well. You have taken a journey with him. Goodbye means taking a journey without him. Life is a journey. There are paths one has to take without one to be with another. Thus, life is sprinkled with goodbyes here and there. The pain in goodbyes comes from the thought of “moments or lifetimes” that we will live without each other. We can sweeten this sorrow with the anticipation of meeting again.

In Charles Schulz's Peanuts, Snoopy Brown said: “Why can't we get all the people together in the world that we really like and then just stay together? I guess that wouldn't work. Someone would leave. Someone always leaves. Then we would have to say good-bye. I hate good-byes. I know what I need. I need more hellos.” In our life's journey, we meet new people along the way. We say goodbyes but we also say hellos. As we bid farewell to those we part ways, we need to welcome those we meet. As we travel along, we can draw strength in knowing that all that we have met in our journey make up part of who we are that we can never lose.