Saying Goodbye

Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children

BY JOHN UPDIKE

They will not be the same next time. The sayings

so cute, just slightly off, will be corrected.

Their eyes will be more skeptical, plugged in

the more securely to the worldly buzz

of television, alphabet, and street talk,

culture polluting their gazes' pure blue.

It makes you see at last the value of

those boring aunts and neighbors (their smells

of summer sweat and cigarettes, their faces

like shapes of sky between shade-giving leaves)

who knew you from the start, when you were zero,

cooing their nothings before you could be bored

or knew a name, not even your own, or how

this world brave with hellos turns all goodbye.

I've been having trouble saying good-bye. It's not just love, not just friendship, it's the history, the loss of someone, perhaps the only someone who knew me almost from my start, and who taught me first hand how this world brave with hellos turns all goodbye. Of course he would do it again. It is his lesson and mine to learn. I have such trouble with them and so they must be forced upon me with the hope that maybe, given enough experience with them, someday I will grow to accept them, endure them, although I'm not sure I'll ever come to love them.

I wonder if that's why I had to be broken open. Maybe I believed too much in bone, in hardness, in whole. Maybe I had to face my own ending, my heart and lungs stilling under a machine hand, while someone desperately tried to patch me since they could not cure me. I had to face leaving this life, these loves, all the things large and little that bind us to this miracle called earth. If so, then perhaps it is time to learn not just brave hellos but brave goodbyes too. Perhaps we need to love the party with all of us, but be prepared to leave if it must be so. I don't know, but I'm finding out.