The Goodbye Girl

How to handle a live wire

Sometimes one person

is holding your whole universe

together.

Blurry but I don’t think I’ve ever been happier.

There are a lot of things I could tell you, but the main one is that everything exploded the week I turned four and my Nanny (my grandma) died.

There were signs, but they kept appearing and disappearing, and anyway, I was too little to understand them. The week before she died, I’d woken up to yelling in the middle of the night. It took me a minute to recognize the people yelling were my parents, and that they were yelling at each other. Then I heard something crash and shatter. I crept out of bed and tiptoed down the hall, heart racing. I peeked into the living room and saw my parents facing each other across the room. My mother’s eyes looked wild, her face was twisted, her hands were in fists by her sides. She looked electrified, like there was too much energy running through her, through the whole room. My dad’s face was purple and he was yelling so loudly his voice bounced off the walls and ricocheted everywhere. My mother was shouting back. I couldn’t understand anything either of them was saying, or what I was seeing. I covered my ears, not my eyes. I still do this watching scary movies. My mother suddenly picked up a vase and threw it at my dad, but it missed, hit the wall and rained glass all over the floor next to whatever she’d thrown first. I was so scared I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. It was so loud I felt sure they’d hear it, too, even over all the other noise, and see me. My knees felt weird, like jelly. I crept back to my room, clung to my doll Suzy, and cried into my pillow. My whole body shook.

My bedroom still smelled like paint. This was another sign I missed: my dad had just painted it a very bright yellow with green trim. He said they were cheerful colors. He built me what he called a crazy bunk bed in the corner. It was L-shaped, one bunk ran along the back wall, and the end of the second, lower bunk, was tucked under it and ran along the side wall. I could jump from the higher bunk to the lower one, but I wasn’t supposed to do that. He built it so I could have sleepovers one day, when I was older. He built shelves with a sliding door under the higher bunk for toys and art supplies. It didn’t occur to me that he was fixing my room now for any particular reason. I fell asleep at some point, in the yellow room in the side bunk with the faint paint smell and my parents screaming at each other in the living room.

When I woke up the morning after their fight, it was like I’d had a bad dream. The living room was spotless and I might have thought it was a dream, but the vase was gone, and the little heart-shaped dish that was always next to it, too. The next week, my Nanny died. Three days later I woke up to find my mother sitting at the dining room table, staring at nothing. She told me with dead eyes in a dead voice that my dad wasn’t going to live with us anymore. He’d left, and he hadn’t even said goodbye.

My mom told me we were going on a trip to a farm. It belonged to a friend of hers I’d never met. Her friend had a daughter my age. There were horses and pigs and chickens. It would be fun. Her voice was still dead. The one sign I did get: when we got there, my mother was telling her friend what time I went to sleep and that I still needed some help tying my shoes, and I understood she was leaving me. In an unfamiliar house with unfamiliar people for an unknown amount of time.

I panicked. I started crying and begging her not to go, or to take me with her if she was going. She pulled me out onto the porch by my arm. It was cold, I could see my breath in the air. She knelt down to my level and hissed at me to stop crying immediately and told me she would be back soon, but she needed to rest. I tried to stop crying, wiped my eyes with the backs of my hands. I told her I would be good, really good, I would be quiet, I would let her sleep, but she insisted she needed me to stay with her friend and would be back to get me soon. Her friend came out on the porch and told me we were going to have fun, it was going to be okay. The daughter stood behind her mother staring at me with a mixture of fascination and pity. I clung to my mother and openly begged her not to go. I really thought I might die if she left me. There was still a chance she might take me away from here, back home. She told me I was being very bad and she was disappointed in me. Her friend said it was okay, really, and she pulled me from my mother at the same time my mother extricated herself from my grip. I knew I was beat. I watched my mom go to our car. She waved at me and said she’d be back soon. She got in and slammed the door, started the engine and took off down the driveway. Maybe she was crying or maybe she felt numb inside, I’ll never know. I kicked my legs and squirmed hard enough that her friend let me down and I ran after the car, but there was no hope. I watched the car reach the end of the driveway and turn onto the road. I got there in time to watch the car disappear around a corner.

Photo by Forrest Cavale on Unsplash

My mother was gone. My dad was - I didn’t know where. My aunt, uncle and cousins were in New Jersey, but I didn’t know where I was and I didn’t know their phone number. My Nanny was in Heaven. I was on a farm with strangers.

When everyone you know is gone at once, it’s going to leave a mark. The mark landed somewhere deep and it was made of pure fear. People you love can just disappear and there’s nothing you can do. 

For a long time I didn’t know the mark was there, like a live wire lying in wait, throwing off sparks. I just knew that I was slow to trust, slow to let people get close to me, slow to really let my guard down. I clung to my best friend like she was life itself - she’d been there before everything exploded, she was my one constant. As I got older, I was quick to figure out what someone needed, and to be that thing. My god I knew how to do that. That way I wouldn’t be left suddenly, wouldn’t be blindsided. I didn’t realize I was doing that, I had no idea what was driving me. I didn’t know for years. But if - after a very long time and a multitude of situations - a person continued to be trustworthy, to not disappear, to not let me down, then that person became family. 

This is why I cried my eyes out when my best friend decided she didn’t want a best friend anymore, she wanted lots of friends, each one equally important to her. Third grade was about to begin. I was eight. I wanted to go to bed and sleep and never wake up. If a person leaves you because of death, it’s devastating, but also obvious you weren’t left on purpose, you weren’t left by choice. My grandmother would never have chosen to leave me. My mom didn’t want to leave me, either. If a person leaves you because they want to, that is agonizing in a different way. It’s personal, it’s a rejection. The live wire in my mind was sending sparks in every direction.

I’ve been in a room with a dead body three times. My paternal grandfather’s when I was ten, my mom’s when I was fifty and my dad’s this last summer. My paternal grandpa - Grandpa Rudy - lived in Buffalo, where my dad grew up. We met once when I was a baby, once when he came to New York City when I was six, and once when my dad married his third wife, my stepmom, when I was eight. He was a funny guy. Loved to play pool, called ketchup and mustard “condiments” a word I hadn’t heard before, and knew how children ought to be treated. He died at ninety, the weekend my dad’s side of the family gathered in Buffalo to celebrate not just his ninetieth birthday, but my great Aunt Tess’s ninety-fifth. Instead of a joint birthday celebration, the weekend turned into my grandfather’s funeral after he went to sleep Friday night and never woke up. He had an open casket, and a wake with everyone dressed in party clothes.

The casket was at the front of the room and I could see my grandpa there in a suit and tie, with his hands folded on his chest. I asked my stepmom if I could go and say goodbye, and she ushered me to the line. I walked up the aisle alone, behind family members I didn’t know, and watched what they did. A lot of them knelt on the little bench by the casket and said something to my grandpa, and moved on. When it was my turn I got closer. The body there looked like my grandfather, but it was all wrong. He was wearing rouge and lipstick and powder. He had never been in a suit anytime I’d met him. I really didn’t know what I was supposed to do or say, but he was my grandpa, so I stood on tiptoe on the little bench, told him I loved him, leaned all the way into the casket, so far my toes lifted up off the bench, and kissed him on the cheek. His cheek was cold and he had stubble. Someone gasped behind me, and I thought maybe I’d done something wrong. Maybe that wasn’t how you were supposed to say goodbye. I stepped down and went back to my stepmom. She told me people don’t usually kiss the person, but it was fine. I felt embarrassed and ashamed, but the thing is, even then, I knew my grandpa wasn’t there anymore. And there is no wrong way to say goodbye.

I can’t talk about watching my mother leave her body at any length right now because today is my birthday, and it’s only the third one when I won’t hear from her. It hurts like hell. It hurts like the not-sound of her voice. I can just say I was there with her in the room, holding her hand and stroking her hair and telling her it was okay, and not to be scared, even though I was absolutely beside myself. And I can tell you I knew when she left her body because I felt it happen. I had the first panic attack of my life about twelve hours later because I suddenly realized I didn’t know where she was. I was still here on planet earth, walking with my feet firmly on the ground, and she was not. It did me in. It was like watching the car disappear around that corner and not knowing where she went or how I could find her. In my head all I could hear was my own voice shouting Mom, Mom, MOM as I walked down the block I grew up on, the block she and I had walked down a million times, and understood she’d never walk down that block again. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t think. 

I fucking hate goodbyes. It’s why I stayed in a few relationships far too long. Gave it the old college try, bent myself like a pretzel, made myself as small as possible, tried not to breathe too loudly. Then held on just a little longer, hoping like a heroin addict I could avoid the end. I stayed when any reasonable person would have left. No one deserves to have their soul crushed. No one deserves to be treated with cruelty after cruelty. I stayed in friendships with people who leaned on me endlessly, too, but weren’t there the one time I wasn’t okay. I stayed because the worst thing possible was the goodbye. 

I’ve been teaching yoga for twenty-eight years. Maybe twenty-nine, I’ve lost track, but a long time. One of the philosophical underpinnings is that attachment leads to suffering. You find this teaching in Buddhism, too, and you’ll know it’s true if you’re alive. We get attached to people, it’s part of the human condition, and it isn’t a part I’d ever want to overcome. What’s better than loving people and being loved back? What’s better than being able to have an entire conversation with one look, because that is how well you know someone and they know you? What’s better than the insane stuff you did as a teenager, and the ability to shake your head about it with the people who were there? Few things beat laughing your ass off with someone until there are tears streaming down your face. Or knowing who to call in the middle of the night because you are not okay. If any of the close people in my life are hurting, I’m hurting, too. I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s next-level with my kids. Yes, losing people is the absolute worst. I’ve never experienced anything like the grief that tore through me the year after my mother died, and can still take my breath away. It cuts you to the bone. It doesn’t seem possible that an entire person can just not be here anymore. In their body, and then not in their body. But I still wouldn’t turn down loving anyone. If suffering is the consequence, I’m still signing up every time.

At a certain point I started working on my attachment to particular outcomes, though, and my intense aversion to goodbyes and being abandoned. I mean, none of us are ever going to enjoy being abandoned, but I realized I was being held hostage by my fear, and I don’t want to be held hostage by anything. Not a person, not a substance, not my attachment to things being a certain way. The fact is, people are messy and they change all the time. This is another thing you know to be true if you’re alive. What someone wants one year may not be the thing they want the next year, or five years after that. If you truly love someone, then you want what they want for themselves. You want them to be happy. If their happiness hinges on walking out the door even if it breaks your heart, the best thing you can do is hold the door open and wish them well. Life is too short for anything else. I don’t want someone to stay unless their entire heart wants to stay.

I used to chase after love, it’s what I did with my mom for most of my life and most of hers. I’d accept apologies that were never offered just to forgive and move on. I’d accept treatment so far below what I wanted, in the hope that maybe tomorrow I’d get that pat on the head. One day I realized I was loving like a beggar even though I was offering all I had. And I thought, why would I offer my everything to someone who makes me beg for scraps? It took a lot of work, but I decided I would never, ever do that again. Healing is how you cap the live wire. 

People are going to leave, sometimes by choice and sometimes not. It’s the hardest part of life, but it’s also one of the few things you can count on. When you love people you’re going to suffer, because human beings have expiration dates we don’t get to know, and because people change and sometimes take a fork in the road and head down a path without you. It hurts and your heart will break, but if you work on it, your heart will break open. It turns out goodbyes are not the worst thing possible. The worst thing possible is not to love. The worst thing possible is to be held hostage by your fear.

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about loss, grief, attachment and goodbyes, I’ll be here 2/16/24 at 11:15am PST or you can wait for The Come As You Are Podcast version. And if you’d like to meet me in Portugal, I’m heading there June 22-29 with an incredible group of people and it’s going to be amazing. Truly.