It's so hard to say goodbye to yesterday...

Last night I said goodbye to friends and a bar that have carried me through the past 2 years and more of my life.

The farewells that I have been able to say pale in comparison to those that I wish that I could say, and my desires even pale in comparison to a proper repayment for the gifts that I have been given from all of the friends that I am bidding adieu. What is the proper way to tell someone that not only are you a different person because you met them but that you are a better person because you met them? How do you best say that the memories you have of someone will be among your most treasured possessions for the rest of your life?

Saying goodbye, saying farewell, seems to me to combine the worst part of dying with the worst part of knowing someone who dies. This is largely because, in some poor mirror of a way, it is like dying and knowing someone who is dying. Admittedly from the outside, as someone who has never died, it seems to me like the worst part is knowing that all of the people you have grown to love will no longer have you in their lives. Indeed, it will be knowing that all of the people who have meaning to you will, from one viewpoint or another, be abandoned by you. As for the second part, knowing someone who is dying or has died, this is less tricky ground. Jesus said to the women of Jerusalem, "Weep not for me but for yourselves." Similarly, my father passed wisdom to me (as he always does) when my grandfather died. He said that when as a boy his twin brother died, a priest asked why he was crying and all he could say was along the lines of "I'll never see him again." The priest pointed out that it was all about himself--that crying was an exercise in selfishness, an admission that the person bothered by the death was the person not dying. And indeed this is true. When someone dies they no longer seek or strive and thus no longer suffer, so we have no reason to weep for them; but we no longer receive the goodness that we did from them, and so we have reason to weep for ourselves. Sorrow when someone dies is an admission that their virtue will no longer be received, that one's own life will be diminished by their no longer being in one's own.

Saying goodbye combines these two positions. I am parting ways with not just my friends but my guides on the path of life, and because of this I am sad that (admittedly I am assuming here) I am, in an uncharitable view, abandoning those who care about me. At the same time, no one enjoys thinking that they have lost something good from their life, and surely by saying goodbye I am surrendering some of the best things I have and have ever had in my life.

Ronald Reagan once referred to the United States of America as the last best hope of mankind on earth. The friends I leave behind have been the first best hope of myself. My greatest personal hope is that I can, with my work and life, adequately reflect the goodness and virtue that they have shown me.