Often our partings are so frequent and casual we don’t even consider the weight of goodbye. Until the bed is empty, the pills and liquid morphine taken to the police station to be destroyed. Easier to comprehend the finality of medicine than the finishing of a human life.
Today is my 70th birthday. Today I pass out of the tenuous grip of late middle age. Today time feels shorter than yesterday—an accurate reading of the temporal situation—and yet there is nothing I can or want to do to lengthen its grip, to recover it. Last week someone dear to me died, someone young and full of life and light and an impossible and beautiful optimism. If I could have given her a ticket to share whatever’s left of my hours, would I have done that? If the answer to this is yes, it’s only because in being with her it became clear to me that we can neither hurry through nor dawdle; a yes means nothing, nor does a no. We just go as we go.
When I was a kid we used to spend Christmas in south Georgia, right up against the Florida line. The old Hiwa theater along the Tallahassee Road closed down every winter, but the sign out front always wished us a Happy New Year! and under that, depending on what letters went missing that year, a God Bye! or Good be! The Hiwa, which we pronounced Heewah, though of course it was shorthand for Highway, was a drive-in, its tall screen towering above the longleaf pines that lined the road. Sometimes as we drove by the empty winter parking lot I imagined hot summer nights, icy drinks, the warm hoods of cars pointed toward the screen and a passel of teenagers doing what teenagers do while ignoring the movie. I was a city girl, far from the life of drive-ins, and the Goodbe-Godbye sign seemed put there to remind me I was out of my territory, the world wasn’t entirely mine. It was an order, a request, a nudge towards home.
Goodbye is an ancient word, a contraction of the phrase “God be with ye.” Its first known use was in 1573. Hello is much younger, a newer idea debuting in 1826 and later popularized by Thomas Edison as a telephone greeting. Hail was the cry of arrival, godspeed a protective charm whispered when sending someone out into the darkness. The two words are twins of a sort, born in different places and times. They both assume a journey, either imminent or past. If time exists, it exists in the gap between hello and goodbye. It’s the span of hours and events we call our lives.
It’s overcast in Georgia today, with rain predicted for the afternoon. The little live oak in front of the house has become a great big tree. The house is holding up well. Sixty years ago it was planted here among the longleaf and loblolly pines. Several alligators still inhabit the nearby swamp, and a scourge of feral hogs has descended on the property, trampling the cornfields, rooting up everything human hands have grown. Another goodbye lies inside this journey back to Georgia. Almost surely it’s the last time I’ll touch foot on this land. A few days here and the feeling and rhythm of the place take hold of me. Giant pitchers of iced tea. Smooth white grits with salt and butter. Red clay roads you can follow for miles and never meet a passing car. The soft air, the interplay of formality and ease, the scent of hay and horses, a few dogs underfoot. And the aging faces of my family, together around a table, enjoying each other over plates of bacon and eggs. No one says it but we all know it: We’re here to honor the fact that we won’t live on forever. And this: Goodbyes are part of knowing where home is.
