Saying Goodbye To Someone Who Continues The Journey
When the person you love is approaching death, it’s hard to find words to say goodbye. In the midst of all the predicament, words sometimes flood out like a waterfall, but nothing you say can fill the emptiness that circulates within you. You know that that colorful garden that sometimes blooms inside you will die too, and no one else can make it grow again.
They are our loved ones: flower gardens that give life to life, rain on the deserts, color for gray afternoons and shade as the sun burns. Sometimes you forget that no garden thrives forever, that a stubborn winter always comes and forces you to say goodbye.
Just some time ago, death was a strange visitor who appeared without warning. But now it’s different. Science is able to keep you alive, even if you are just a body without consciousness, a body that breathes and whose heart beats. Science has also allowed us to prolong pain without the hope of getting relief.
On the other hand, it is now also possible to choose the day, time, and way you want to die, and put you in a place that science has never been able to name. Euthanasia is like programmed death, and despite being predictable, it leaves us with no more sense of comfort or control.
Saying goodbye to not knowing how
We are all doomed to death the second we are born. But not knowing when to go opens up a fan of uncertainty that is both encouraging and frightening. However, once death is defined for its month, day, and moment, the clock begins to accelerate to the pace of nervousness. One more minute is one minute less. So every shared experience becomes another way to say goodbye.
Euthanasia is one of those complex situations that puts you on the brink of a painful paradox. On the other hand, you want to respect another person’s decision, and you should be able to say goodbye to 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, how it feels when you look for him, and you no longer find him, except for the dried up traces of your own tears.
No one leaves goodbye without sadness. No one makes a decision about euthanasia without sleepless mornings, looking for solutions that never appear. Physical and mental pain must end.
The decision comes when they know that when they cross the border, they can never be the same again, but suffering has penetrated every second of every minute, and they no longer have individual freedom. At this point, death becomes an escape.
I go, but the birds keep singing
It is not easy to understand and accept that someone has made the decision to die. You refuse to say goodbye to your loved one, both for the idea that people have control over their own destiny, determining the moment when their lives should end.
The recognition of these truths hurts because you know that part of you will die with the person who is leaving you. Saying goodbye is the beginning of an uncertain journey, a journey that takes you everywhere and nowhere.
Every time you see this person, panic bursts attack when you remember he’s here now, but in a week you’ll never see him again. That these are the last smiles, the last words that you will share with him, and then, never again.
And you cry internally so that that brave person in front of you doesn’t see your tears because you have to say one goodbye, but he has to do it many times. You want to hug this person, never letting him go, but you know your only job is to let go.
Nervousness grows when you realize he’s dying, but the love you feel for him doesn’t. It will survive, and first it will turn into silent distress as you go through their absence in your memory, when you miss her laughter, when you want to ask her what she knew you didn’t do, and when you need to feel her kindness instead of the coldness that has taken over from you. You understand that you have to say goodbye to him many times, even when they are already gone.
When that first great moment filled with pain is over, you go back to the garden that is now uninhabited and you are surprised to see that the flowers are gone, but their scent remains. And the song of the birds has not disappeared, but has turned into music that protects your heart. You realize that some seeds have an endless harvest, and you will say, with the poet Rensek, “I have cleansed the mirror of my heart… Now it reflects the moon.”
Personal message: Bon Voyage, my dear friend.
