* on (not) being very good at saying goodbye, part II

it happened again. last Wednesday the lovely young lady our son has been dating left for her home and is now with our son and about 70 other young adults in Chicago, as they work on getting ready for their overseas assignments. so when she left, it was for a year. and then on Sunday we took our son (her boyfriend) to the airport to see him pass through security and then disappear to the land beyond site of those of us without tickets to somewhere else. it was hard. it is hard.

i’ve had some people tell me that doing this must be easier since we went overseas ourselves. so is it easier? or is it harder? the answer for me to these two questions is “yes.” easier in that we probably have a bit better sense of where they’re headed and at least some of what they’ll experience, including some pretty amazing experiences. and harder for all the same reasons. (it’s also not necessarily easier for me insofar as what i’m good at is the going part of it all, not in staying here! as my wife said as we walked back to our car, “it was easier when we were the ones leaving,” which for me, again is both true and false)

in saying this goodbye i’ve realized for the first time that one of the things i tend to do with the part of my life that was in Madagascar is to focus, probably way too much, on the good, even best of memories. and yet in sending off those i love, i probably squeeze together too many of the tough things involved in it all. and so neither of these perspectives are really fair, as, while i feel very blessed for every one of my almost 20 years growing up and then working in Madagascar, it wasn’t all good times. and while some times were hard, these tough experiences, after we’d made some big adjustments upon arrival in Madagascar, which took awhile, tended to be intermittent.

so goodbye, loved ones! we have some sense of what you’re doing and probably even a better sense of all we don’t know about what you’ll be experiencing. God’s speed and blessing you two!