227. The Shape of Goodbye - LaTonya Yvette
Alice de Miramon, L’adieu (2020)
While meditating this morning, I prayed for the long string of goodbyes I’ve asked my body to absorb…
My mother was terrible at goodbyes. Her nickname was Waterhead, since she cried at nearly every goodbye, the kind of cry that turned her banana-colored skin red, made a thick, green vein pop from her forehead, and exposed her tendency to blubber in a heartfelt and laughable way. She had to say more goodbyes than I could count, whether because of sudden death or unmet expectations. I also am terrible at goodbyes. If I do better than my mother, it’s because she faced and bore the unimaginable, making the way a little easier for me.
For my friends and family who know me well, I don’t speak words, I look at them and my eyes say, Okay, I am going to run and make this the least kind of painful. Goodbyes, I suppose, get easier within generations, but lately I’ve been thinking about them within the context of our lives, and the interrelation between our traumas, the people and things we must say farewell to. Like my father, who journeyed from Colón, Panama, to New York City, in the 1970s. He immigrated with his mother, right behind his father, and said goodbye to customs, language, and familiarity. I wonder how these, along with all my mother’s goodbyes, have been passed down to me.
My dad has been dead for fourteen years this September. Every September, before I realize the time of year, I spend two full weeks feeling foreign, wondering why the bottom of my feet seem to have given out as I trudge along the concrete of New York City, which once upon a time became his adopted sanctuary. Fourteen years of mourning a non-goodbye-goodbye, and sifting through what remains of him and his choices, somewhere inside of me.
While meditating this morning, I prayed for the long string of goodbyes I’ve asked my body to absorb: The ones that weren’t quick; the ones where words weren’t compulsory, or needed more language, more clarity, more feeling; the ones that should have happened but didn’t; the ones that did but the heaviness multiplied in their lacking.
Yes, fourteen years since my dad died. Seven years since I began therapy. And thirty-seven days since I arrived at the conclusion that all those old goodbyes can sprinkle their dust on the new ones. It circles back to the same damn thing: Goodbyes are hard, y’all.
When Serena Williams announced she was retiring from tennis last year, she let us down in the easiest way possible: a Vogue magazine cover photo of her beautiful figure on a beach, in a sky blue Balenciaga gown. At first, all you notice is Serena’s frame, the setting, and what feels eerily familiar to reaching the pearly gates of Heaven. She is freedom and strength personified. As your eye strolls over to the right, you find Olympia, her five-year-old daughter, and her husband, Alexis Ohanian. Suddenly, the goodbye feels different. It’s the metamorphosis of a complex goodbye: reluctance and heartbreak but also joy.
Goodbyes are evolution and transition she tells Vogue—words that I, too, have said. What remains true for all of us is the importance of how we say goodbye. The words we use to say goodbye. How we take care of others when we do. Maybe most importantly, how goodbyes make room for something new.
- LaTonya Yvette
