Saying Goodbye To Someone Who Is Going To Pass Away
When someone you love is going to die, it’s hard to find the words to say goodbye. In the midst of all the anxiety, they sometimes end up coming out like a waterfall, but nothing you say can fill the emptiness that writhes inside you. You know that a colorful garden of colors that once flourished within you will also die, and that no one else will make it grow again.
They are the ones we love: Flowering gardens that give glow to your life, rain to your deserts, colors to your gray afternoons, and shade when the sun burns. Sometimes you forget that no garden can flourish forever, that a stubborn winter will always force you to say goodbye.
Until not long ago, Death was a strange visitor who presented himself without warning. But now it’s different. Science is able to keep you alive, even if you are just a body without consciousness that breathes and has a heartbeat. Science has also given us the opportunity to prolong the pain without hope of finding relief.
On the other hand, it is now also possible to choose the day, time and way you want to die, to put yourself in a place that science has never been able to give a name to. Euthanasia is a kind of programmed death which, because it is predictable, leaves us with no less comfort and no more sense of control.
Saying goodbye to someone without knowing how
We are all doomed to death the second we are born. But not knowing when to go opens a fan of uncertainty, which is encouraging and frightening at the same time. But when death has a specific month, day and time, the clock begins to speed up the rhythm of anxiety. One minute more is one minute less. And then each shared experience becomes a different way of saying goodbye.
Euthanasia is one of the complex situations that puts you in front of a painful paradox. On the one hand, you will respect the will of the other person, and you should be ready to say goodbye with gratitude in your heart. But on the other hand, you feel a little desperate when you imagine what the world will be like without that person, what it will be like to look for them and not find them, except in the dry tracks of your own tears.
No one says goodbye to life without sadness. No one decides to perform euthanasia without spending many sleepless early mornings in search of solutions that never appear. The physical and emotional pain must end.
The decision is made when they know that when they cross that border, they can never be the same, but that suffering has invaded every second of every minute, and they have no individual freedom anymore. At that time, death becomes an escape.
I go, but the birds will continue to sing
It is not easy to understand and accept that someone has made the decision to die. You refuse not only to say goodbye to your loved ones, but also to the idea that people have control over their destiny, by defining the moment their lives will end.
It hurts to admit these truths, because you know that part of you will die with the person leaving you. Saying goodbye to someone is the start of an insecure journey that takes you everywhere and nowhere.
Every time you see that person, you panic when you remember that they are here now, but in a week you will never see them again. That these are the last smiles, the last words you ever share with them, and never again.
And you weep inside, so that the brave person in front of you does not see your tears, because you have to say one goodbye, but they have to say many. You want to hug that person and never let them go, but you know that your only job now is to let go.
Anxiety increases when you realize that they will die, but that the love you feel for them will not. It will survive, and first it will turn into a silent sorrow. Grief when you go over their absence in your memory, when you miss their laughter, when you want to ask them what they knew and did not know, or when you need to feel their kindness instead of all the cold that has taken over you. You understand that you have to say goodbye to them many times, even after they have left.
After the first great moment of pain, you return to the garden which is now uninhabited, and you will see with surprise that the flowers have gone away, but their smell has not. Nor does it have the bird’s song, which is now music that protects your heart. You understand that some seeds have an eternal harvest, and you want to say, together with the poet Renseki: “I have washed the mirror off my heart… Now it reflects the moon.”
Personal message: Bon voyage, my dear friend.
