BENEATH THE SKYLINE

Goodbyes

Deborah Good

When gearing myself up for an afternoon of writing, I sometimes pull a collection by a favorite author from my shelf. I choose an essay, at random, which I read as though eating a pomegranate—slowly enough to release the tart juice from each tiny sac, and then swallowing, seed and all. Experiencing the rhythm of someone else’s written words helps me let loose my own. Anne Lamott and David James Duncan are among those who have bolstered me to face the intimidating white of the blank page.

Today I read Barbara Kingsolver—an essay entitled "Marking a Passage" in her book, Small Wonder. In the essay, she tells us how, over the years, independent booksellers have offered her refuge, sustenance, and then publicity that she considered vital to the success of her first novel. She describes her sadness when the Book Mark, one of her favorite independent bookstores in Tucson, closed its doors in 1999, unable to survive the growth of the Internet and the national chains. I hugged each of my friends behind the counter, she writes, and told them: I can’t bear this passing.

Goodbyes can indeed be hard. Goodbyes of all kinds can be so hard.
It is the big ones that we most remember. I remember bidding farewell to my first job out of college. I was on the editorial staff of The Other Side magazine, an almost forty-year-old venture in independent publishing, with offices at the intersection of Apsley and Pulaski Streets in Philadelphia. Our building was creaky and dusty (we opted not to pay for cleaning staff), and piled high with files and books and old magazines. We were underfunded and understaffed, but the hard work, commitment, and simple good-heartedness of readers, volunteers, donors, and staff had helped put the magazine out every two months, year after year, since the Civil Rights Movement.

My second year at The Other Side was a real struggle for the organization. Finances and morale were flagging and eventually became so depleted that the board voted to cease publication. The whole staff was laid off, including some who had poured their lives into the effort for more than a decade. We said goodbye to each other, to the magazine, and to the creaky and dusty building we had come to know well. This was not an easy parting.

Other folks I know have seen their marriages end, their nonprofits close up, or their band-mates head in separate directions. It may be tempting to see these life events as more than goodbyes—as altogether failed endeavors. But I think failure is the wrong word.

Sometimes seasons of our lives end not because of failure but because they have served their time, and their time is now up.
I like the Buddhist concept of impermanence—that life is in constant flux, that who we are in one moment is different from who we will become in the next. I imagine myself as molecules in a stream, bubbling over rocks and between banks. Streams are somehow both rushing and serene, in constant motion and perfectly unchanging, all at once.

In the 1970s, my dad helped found a small, alternative school in Washington, D.C., called the Learning Center. Thirty years later, as he approached death to cancer, we learned that the Learning Center was also in its last year, due to financial challenges. I remember well my dad’s reflection on this ending: "I feel some sense of loss, of course, in that something I helped give birth to is coming to an end," he said. But some efforts have limited life spans. The Learning Center’s closing, he told me, did not undo the good it had done. For 30 years, the school had served foster children and children with special needs when few services were available to them.

Perhaps my dad’s words seem to state the obvious, but when I am all mixed up in a pain-filled goodbye, it can be hard to remember that not everything can—nor should—last forever.

I come across a file on my laptop with a title that reminds me of a Pete Seeger song (later covered by the Byrds). My computer tells me the file is called there is a season.doc and that I wrote it a little over a year ago, late at night. I start humming the song (Turn! Turn! Turn!) and double-click on the file name, curious.

Sometimes is a good word to remember, I read, because very little in my life is always. Most seasons do pass from one into the next. . . . When the hard times seem interminable, sometimes is a good word to remember.

I vaguely recollect writing this sentence, during a rough patch. The rest of the page is a long list, one sentence after the other. Sometimes I listen exclusively to Elliott Smith for an entire weekend. Sometimes I play soccer without shin guards. Sometimes I let my laundry pile up for three weeks. Sometimes I feel sad. Sometimes I cannot stop laughing. Sometimes I don’t care, and sometimes I really, really do. Sometimes there is way too much to do. Sometimes I feel remarkable. Sometimes I feel remarkably inadequate.

And on and on. There is a season. My grandfather would want me to point out (so, of course, I will) that these words weren’t originally Pete Seeger’s. They are from Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3: For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up. . . .

And on and on. The verses ring with impermanence.

Jacob, my three-year old neighbor, has taken to throwing occasional fits when he learns that his mother is going somewhere without him. "But I-eeee want to go tooooo!" he cries, big, wet drops spilling onto his cheeks. His mom and I recently had breakfast plans. She managed to sneak out the front door to meet me on the porch, while he was playing with Dad in the backyard, hoping to avoid the teary scene. But I feel for Jacob, because I have been there too.

Every transition or slight shift in my life’s direction has involved a letting go. Whether I was hugging my new friends goodbye at the end of a week of summer camp, tossing off my jersey after my last college soccer game, or hugging my dad for the very last time, at least part of me always wanted to hold tightly onto whatever was familiar, wanted to (like Jacob) stick close to Mom and go wherever she went, instead of saying goodbye.

This moment marks for me a small yet significant goodbye. Here ends my final column for DreamSeeker Magazine. It has been more than seven years since Michael King, the editor, contacted me by email, inviting a submission. Since then, I have written over twenty-five columns for the magazine, always under the heading, "Beneath the Skyline." I have grown up, both as writer and as human being, in the past seven years, and my quarterly column leaves a record of where I have been. Whether that record is more noteworthy or embarrassing is up for discussion.

I am grateful to DreamSeeker for a venue, to Michael for his encouragement, you for reading my writing, and to the many who have written thoughtful emails in response. My writing has felt most alive when it has become a conversation.

I am learning, I think, that always beyond the sadness of goodbyes, new spaces open up—the way that dandelions sometimes grow up through the sidewalk where it cracks. I have come to see life as like the forests that are healthier if a fire occasionally blows through, taking out the dead wood in the underbrush, and like the pinecones I remember hearing about, which must endure the heat of a blaze before they will open and spill their seeds.

Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a senior research assistant at Research for Action (www.researchforaction.org) and author, with Nelson Good, of Long After I’m Gone (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia, 2009). She welcomes your thoughts via email: deborahagood@gmail.com. With this column, she bids DreamSeeker a grateful goodbye.