If I had known that it was goodbye, I would have bucked against the passing of time on that muggy August evening. I would have bloodied my hands pulling on the rope of time, so desperate to slow it all down.

We would have taken the long way home,

would have spoken our love with desperation and fervour

would have engaged the child locks and kept you safe in my backseat for as long as your patience would allow

(not long).

Goodbye to you and Hello and Welcome to Club Grief for me.

If I knew it was our goodbye I would have taken more time to memorize every freckle and scar just like the cliché suggests.

Every detail of your bad tattoo that looked a little like a dead baby head.

The scar on your side from a shady-looking-mole removal. I have a matching one that I haven’t gotten checked for fear I would lose another part of you. Fear of them excising a little chunk of me that has always reminded me of the way our bodies were shaped in the same womb.

I would have said goodbye to that perfect hairline that almost touched your eyebrows. The strong jaw line and the eyes that are my own.

To the sideways grin that slid out when I gently pushed you from being annoyed to laughing with me. To the version of your face that twisted with anger and rage and pain when you pushed yourself too far from the care you needed to feel okay and the blackness crept toward you.

Goodbye to your screeching laugh and goodbye to the way you asked for soft tickles.

Goodbye is just another word for grief. It isn’t a final act or a simple phrase. It doesn’t tidy things or wrap them up in a neat little package we can tie to a stick and carry over our shoulder. Goodbye is the mess we make until the end.

My goodbye to you is every moment I have lived since you stopped breathing.

It is every moment I will live until my consciousness finds yours someday and whispers hello through the trees.

Goodbye to your anguish, your darkness, and the intensity of your pain. Goodbye to your suffering. Goodbye to the burning heat of your depression’s flame.

I am singing goodbye to you when I let the rain fall onto my face and plaster my hair to my head. I am screaming goodbye when I cheer for our girls who dance or when I am apologizing before I am ready because I know you’d want me to. I am dancing goodbye when I turn on your favourite songs in the shower. I am holding goodbye when I sit in the building with your name on it and make room for others and their joy and their pain and their desire to belong.

Goodbye to you when I am laughing until I cry on my garage floor with my best friends, suddenly struck by the intensity of the echoes of laughter as each guffaw clatters against my hollow ribcage. Amazed that my fascia can contain the contradiction of the grief and sadness and joy and elation.

Goodbye to you as we navigate the piranha-invested waters of a desire to create a new life when my own relationship to being alive has been as fraught as a see-saw of yes-no-yes-no-yes-no. A see-saw of hello-goodbye-hello-goodbye-hello-goodbye. A life filled with horrific joy and beautiful grief. A voice in my head bouncing between my ears like a well-flung bouncy-ball screaming

“how will we do it without you”.

How will I do this without you. Hello to always finding new ways to grieve you. Your absence so ever-present that there is a hole cut in the shape of you through all of our best moments.

Goodbye to you is another way of saying good morning or goodnight. It is the name of the play of the rest of my life. It is the story I will write until I someday join you in the land of goodbye and the see-you-never-or-maybe-someday.

Goodbye until you cross my mind ten minutes from now.

Goodbye for now and Happy 28th Birthday to you, Jake.

💕 One of my favourite writers, Suleika Jaouad, recently sent an email encouraging writing on the “Shape of Goodbye” through a beautiful prompt by LaTonya Yvette. This is what transpired.