Saying Hello
I’ve probably said this in so many ways that I’ve become quite predictable. I have a relatively easy time saying goodbye to places. That comes from my lifetime of moving, first as a trailing child and eventually as an adult with a roving eye and more than a modicum of wanderlust. But saying goodbye to places is always much easier than saying goodbye to people for sure. I’ve been pretty fortunate in my life in that I haven’t had to say goodbye to too many people that I care about. About the only one that really had an impact on me was when my mother died, and since she died at 100, it was hardly a surprise and she was graceful enough to do it in a way that allowed us all to make out peace with it and say goodbye properly to her. Knock on wood, but tragedy has not visited my house much and my siblings and children as well as my spouses are all alive and well. I’ve had a few aunts and uncles who I liked, move on, but I’m not sure I was close enough to have that matter so much to me. My father was pretty remote from my life and my grandparents were gone long before I had the opportunity to bond much with them.
I, like most people, find that the best medicine for saying goodbye to anyone is to find a way to say hello to someone new. Life accommodates that cycle since there are new people coming into our lives every day. My daughter has two daughters and while time marches on and they are 9 and 6 respectively, my sons have yet to have children and I imagine they both will in the coming years. I suspect they will each afford me the opportunity to say hello to new family members at some point when they are good and ready. My oldest is now 40, so I’m guessing that happens sooner rather than later if it is to be. As for my youngest, he will be 28 when he marries next year. If we assume normal five year respite between matrimony and conception, he will be 33 and I will be 75 when that time comes. If we assume he has two kids, that will put me close to 80 when the last of my grandchildren are born. Since my oldest granddaughter will be 20 then, there’s even a chance, long shot though it may be given the age at which young people are marrying and procreating, that I may be able to say hello to a great-grandchild.
The other trick I have used to say goodbye, as in the case of my dear mother, is to write about their lives. I believe that writing your loved ones’ biography or a simple story about them is perhaps the most cathartic and healthy things you can do to put a fine point on your grief of loss. In the same way that people often come to peace with their own lives by writing their memoirs or autobiography, reliving someone else’s life is a wonderful way to internalize their life and times and actually feel some of what they felt through their life. Writing is not for everyone, but it sure works for me.
Yesterday I watched a movie called Last Call about the end of days for F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was written by Frances Kroll Ring, who was his last secretary and assistant before he died at the young angle of 44. Fitzgerald is now considered one of the greatest American writers with works like The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon (which is what he was writing when he died). He was part of the Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein clan of writers, who shared their angst over the changing global environment of the early Twentieth Century. The movie takes place at a time when Fitzgerald needs the money from a new novel and even needs more the reassurance that he can still write as he has done. We see the writing process and the pains of birthing good prose pried from a troubled soul in bits and pieces. Along the way to saying goodbye to his life, the point is that Fitzgerald has the opportunity to also say hello to Frances as a new and inspirational person in his life. Frances is an aspiring writer and it is in his reflection on her that he is able to reprise his own life as a writer. It is an interesting perspective, at least for a writer such as myself.
Today I said hello to a lot of old things that I brought from Ithaca and placed and hung here and there, mostly in my study, where clutter on the surfaces and walls is allowable if not encouraged. I do not pretend that this is a new hello, but rather a comfortable old hello to things and remembrances that still mean a lot to me. I was feeling very satisfied with my progress, since my assimilation of those 20 boxes is now more or less complete after four days of work. I was sitting back to relax on the deck when my daughter texted me. She asked if she could carve my granddaughter’s initials into a tree on the Homeward Bound property. It reminded me that this is her last few days there and then she will be forced to say goodbye to the place for good. She is less adept at that than I am and I feel for her having to go through it. But I have seen her do it with our house in Quiogue and the very house that her mother raised her in in Rockville Centre. She survived both as she will survive leaving Homeward Bound behind her. I am not so bold as to say it is good for her, but I will say that she is strong enough to let go and find something new to say hello to.
She and her family have planned a trip to London and Paris in the coming weeks, which should take them squarely into the back-to-school season. She reminded me that this will be the first time she has ever gone overseas without me. All I can say to that is that it’s about time she did that and I’m glad she has something planned to look forward to that isn’t in Ithaca to help her keep her mind off the transition that is being forced upon us.
There will be another moment this Fall when my daughter will think about the house in Ithaca. She and her family would normally go up in the Fall and celebrate her anniversary. She and her husband, John, were married in a ceremony in Sage Chapel on the Cornell campus and then had their reception in the Dyson Atrium of Sage Hall, where the Johnson Graduate School of Business is located. Within feet of the spot where she and John cut their wedding cake was the Wall of Honor, where yours truly is ensconced in bronze with fifteen other men who have served the school over its 75 year history. I think I will put them up this year at a nice local Inn to help with that visit.
The real issue will come up next summer when they would normally be looking for a place to spend the summer as they have in Ithaca for several years now. The plan is already in place to have them come out here and stay with us for that July timeframe. We will all go for a family gathering to southern Utah to the Lodge at Red River Ranch. We will go up to Disneyland, their favorite place in the Universe. And we will plan lots of other activities to make it a very special and different summer experience for them. They will be saying hello to California rather than goodbye to Ithaca.