Cheryl Ries

Sometimes in life, we have to learn to say our goodbyes.  It's inevitable.  Life happens, situations change, circumstances occur and those we love leave.  It's not ever easy . . if it were, there wouldn't be a whole industry dealing with grieving and therapy wrapped up in helping people to cope with losses.  The simple fact of the matter is that we are always going to have to learn to face the inevitable thief who comes to steal our steady contentment and joy, replacing it with fear, anger, pain, hurt, and a flood of loss washing over us.  On any given day, people may come happily into our lives anew, but we may have to learn to say goodbye too.

No matter how many times you have said goodbye to someone, whether in a breakup or by death, the feeling is usually the same.  It's grief.  It starts with shock and sometimes mixes immediately with anger, but always sadness swirls in to take your happiness temporarily away, much like the clouds moving over the sun.  Even when you have purposefully extricated someone from your life, you still feel much the same way about it, for it is a loss, albeit by choice.  The worse losses are those, whether expected or not, which take those we love deeply away from us for good by death.  If you've never experienced a loss like that, you are very fortunate.  If you have, you know as I do, the sense of grief washing over you like a tsunami of pain and hurt.  It ebbs and floods again forward, with no rhyme nor reason, it takes its toll upon every part of your life, and when it finally eases up in the future, there's no absolute recovery, only a tender daily lessening of the impact.

Love is never easy to leave behind nor to lose.  By choice, it's a double-edged sword.  To give it up requires a sense that the pain without it will be less in time than the pain you experience with it.  When it just happens through the cruel twists of fate without your say-so, you will one day feel more like your old self again, but time is what is required, and at best, it takes a lot.  You'll never be all the way back to the way you were before the loss, but then again, we are never, from one day to the next, the same anyway.  Learn to find the positive in all circumstances, even if at first that seems highly implausible, for it is what makes the hurt have less power for a shorter period of time in your life.  That's the best you can hope for!