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First goodbyes are the hardest when you're young and don't have much accumulated. They feel like losses and leave emptiness inside and bits of their fragments tie into your next goodbye. Our next goodbyes are not quite as teary-eyed as we clench our fists around the thing that is trying to escape from our grasp. We are going to keep it because it ours, we remember how hard it was to say our first goodbye.

Then we get older and goodbyes happen a little more and we don't hold on as tightly. The gap is still there, the fragments fly around reminding us of all we've lost, but we let go a little at a time. We grow up and we go on and say our hesitant goodbyes.

Then one day, for no particular reason, it occurs to us that every time we say goodbye, something new appears in our lives. We start to wonder if it was always that way and then we think back to all of our other goodbyes. We begin to realize that we weren't really losing anything when we said goodbye. We were letting go of something that had run its course and in its wake; something new took its place.

Sometimes goodbyes are not for you, but for the ones you love. We have to say goodbye when it's time for them to go. We are not really losing them, but letting them continue on a path unseen to us. Goodbyes are not admissions of loss. They are just the realization of a new process unfolding. It's selfish for us to not let go. One day, it will be our time to go and we will want our loved ones to say goodbye, so that we'll know it's okay to proceed.

Goodbyes are not endings; they are a thank you that feels like the end. But, after every ending there is a new beginning. Say your goodbyes graciously and willingly. A goodbye given in begrudging way only impedes the natural flow of life. Nothing is final. Everything is in transition.

Learn more about this author, Stacia Elizabeth Whitbeck.
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