The Journey of Goodbye

Early tomorrow morning, I fly back to the United States; and thus will end my time in Scotland.

At this stage in my life, goodbyes have a distinctly different flavor than they did when I was much younger.  Goodbyes have always been hard for me (see Hard Good-byes ), but now they are even more so as I come to the stage in life when you know, genuinely know, that each goodbye has the potential of finality, of the last time, the last embrace, the last fond glance, for nothing in this life is guaranteed.

So even as we plan when we will meet again, we say goodbye as if it really mattered, because somehow, it does, as, looking back over my shoulder (both literally and figuratively), these people oh, so dear to me, fade smaller and smaller, them to me and I to them, into the backdrop of the past.

Photo of grounds of Culzean Castle by Idris Crumlish

It is a disconcerting moment, this bending and blending of time present and time past.

Thus am I left with the visuals of memory . . .

The chance meeting with Peter and Ann, as we each dance so briefly into and out of each other’s lives . . .

Myra left in my hurry to the next friend, standing in the shop looking at shoes – it’s so very ordinary and made the more special for it . . .

Alison and Jamie walking away, hand-in-hand, into the night on the sidewalks of Largs as I sit in the car and watch for just a moment before heading in the opposite direction – away and towards . . .

Cameron and Fraser and Rachel and I posing together, Alison always being good at capturing the moment as we measure my visits like growth charts with me as the wall against which these maturing young people move from childhood into something somehow sweeter for its fleeting . . .

Charlie, always with smile on his face, as kind in the parting as in the welcome . . .

Christine, who seems to get younger as I get older (so unfair as we’re the same age and she about two months older) – as we hug, I feel her shoulders are so small for all they carry that I hate to let her go . . .

Ruaridh smiling his way through it all – his life just begun, such things as goodbyes must seem so trivial in the hurry to the next thing . . .

Neil’s smile above his mother’s head, the son now larger in life than the mother – and Moira’s hug, always reminding me of our first goodbye when she whispered hast ye back into my ear . . .

Bill’s final act of tending this former student, leading me in caravan fashion out of town in the dark of the night, the wave of the flashing car lights our final goodbye as he went right and I left on the roundabout, my spoken thank you unheard by intended ears . . .

Zara hugging me tight and telling me over and over again I don’t want you to go . . .

The well-wishing handshakes at Castlehill Church, all asking with the anxiety of the superstitious – or the weather-worn –  you won’t take the sunshine with you, will you? – I think but do not say that even if I could, I would never take sunshine from these people . . .

Idris and what I imagine will be a quiet hug and goodbye, having had far too many of the hard forever kind of goodbyes of late . . .

Liz – friend and colleague, mentor and confidant, trailblazer and listening ear – how will I do without you close by?  I know when we hug for the last time, I will cry, but it will be all right – we both know it is what I do . . .

The lasting visual of my goodbye to Scotland will be the crowd at the window. . . Leaving Christine and Charlie’s house after a lovely evening filled with good food and better conversation, I turn back for one last look and see in the dark the lit front window as frame for the crowd standing there – Stuart and Patricia, Monica and Les, Ricky and Susan, Charlie and Christine – all waving goodbye.  They are in shadow to us, but I can still see them smiling . . .

All my goodbyes – the ones already had and those yet to come – stand framed in my mind, the real people that they are frozen in moments in time – that thing we call the past – even as they and as I continue our own presents.

And so it is that through all my goodbye tears, I too am smiling – smiling into the faces of friends – even those I leave, knowing the comfort that the void of these goodbyes will soon be filled with the presence of heart-warming hellos – home.