A Lifetime of Goodbyes Has Made Me Numb
But there are a few that still slip through.
Goodbyes are often hard and at fifty years of age, I’ve said more than my fair share.
For the majority of my life, they have been difficult, even heartbreaking, but in recent years I’ve become numb to the feelings of sadness they usually elicit. It’s as if my heart has become a fortress with a warrior goddess standing guard as an ultimate act of protection.
Whilst my epic journey to find my home and tribe has made me far more empathic and sensitive to the struggles of others, it has also created a void in me that I desperately want to close.
One might assume that I am referring to death, to that final goodbye, but this post is not about those farewells, it’s about saying goodbye to the living.
It all started at the age of…
Six
The first recollection that I have of a devastating goodbye was with my preschool friend Jacqui. I remember very little from my childhood and although I’ve forgotten what she looked like, I do recall that saying goodbye was extremely difficult. A vague memory recollects me standing in the driveway with tears running down my face as I waved goodbye to the retreating car.
Jacqui’s family was moving. I was six years old when she left.
Nine
My father was a prominent member of his local Rotary Club as well as the vice president of the province’s Rotary Youth Exchange chapter. Every year his club welcomed one or two international students who had been selected to spend a year in a South African school.
The American students had not yet completed their schooling and the year counted towards their education back home, whilst the Germans, Australians, and South Americans enjoyed a bonus year before making any decisions about college.
Every year they came and went with ensuing goodbyes.
For the most part, I wasn’t particularly perturbed about their goodbyes, but there was one student that broke my heart, Julie, an Australian girl from Melbourne. I adored her. She was eighteen and I was nine. As the eldest child to a younger sister, Julie was the big sister that I needed. She was kind and loving and truly seemed to care for me.
The goodbye was brutal. My father clung to me as I sobbed in the departure hall of the international airport.
Fourteen
Apart from the usual ebb and flow of exchange students, life moved on and goodbyes didn’t rock my world until the most important person in my world left.
My godmother, Stella — affectionately referred to as Arny, left South Africa to return to England and her family.
She had been married to my father’s half-brother, Bob, and had been the rock in my life from the time I entered it. Stella had moved to South Africa with her husband to reunite with my grandparents and father in the wake of a devastated England after the Second World War.
To say that I adored her would be a colossal understatement. I screamed and cried when my mother used to drive me away from her house after our visits. When Bob left her for a younger woman and took all their money, she moved in with my grandfather and then in with us. She got a job as a matron in one of the city’s boarding schools and came home on the weekends to her little cottage in our backyard.
To this day, I cannot find a single soul that remembers her any other way than extremely fondly. I do believe that she was an angel among us.
When I had to say goodbye to her as she headed back to her homeland, it broke something inside me. I loved her as a mother and couldn't fathom a life without her.
Due to my extreme sadness after she left, my parents sent me to visit her for six weeks over Christmas. We had the most wonderful time until I had to return home with another round of goodbyes chipping away at my heart.
That was the last time I saw her. She died on my nineteenth birthday in a hospital in Scotland after a fall showed that she was riddled with cancer. I will believe until the day I die that she held on in her coma until my birthday to say a special goodbye.
That’s all I can say about that.
Thirty
I finished high school, travelled as an exchange student at eighteen to the US, and again as an au pair at twenty-one. I met people and said goodbye but they were par for the course and not especially difficult.
I said goodbye to my hometown and moved to Cape Town with my family where I built a solid friend base. The hometown goodbyes had taken a small toll but the new friendships softened the blow.
I started a new relationship with an Afrikaans woman and after a year together we made the decision to emigrate to New Zealand.
Goodbyes were hard and brutal. Saying goodbye to my parents was the most difficult as deep inside me, I knew that we would never live in the same country again. South Africa had become far too violent and returning was not an option.
My partner and I packed up our lives into a twenty cubic foot container, sent our kitties into quarantine, and cried… at the airport, on the plane, and many times on the other side.
I’m not sure whether losing my godmother at nineteen had laid the foundation of my fortress or saying goodbye to the only life I’d ever known at thirty, but the building had begun.
Forty-Four
There were goodbyes during the fourteen years that passed.
I left New Zealand after four years and said goodbye to the friends I had made there, none of which caused me much concern. I had not enjoyed my time in the land of the long white cloud and it was a relief to say goodbye.
I also said goodbye to my partner of five years and despite a lot of water having flowed under that bridge, it was a rough farewell. We had been each other’s everything through the difficult journey of immigration but it was time to move on.
I spent ten amazing years in Australia coming into my own. I put myself through college, earning two degrees in Psychology, moved more times than I care to mention, changed jobs a fair few times, and cycled through a few iterations of friends as I grew into newer versions of myself.
Then it came time to leave. The choice had been mine but I was loath to saying goodbye.
I had good friends over to my home for dinners to say fond farewells but there were three women that I didn’t want to leave. Three women who had become my lifeline in the sunburnt country as we supported each other through the trials and tribulations of single lives.
As the time grew nearer, I dreaded those goodbyes.
The day came for me to fly. My life was packed into boxes and my kitty was settled in with a friend for a few weeks until he could join me in Texas a few weeks later.
I was numb. I couldn’t believe it. I thought that I would be a sobbing mess in the departure terminal as they gathered to bid me farewell. Leaving these three women was something that I didn’t want to do but something inside me had broken. The weight of a lifetime of goodbyes had finally crept deep into my soul and I barely managed to squeeze out a tear.
There was no doubt in my mind that I would miss them but I couldn’t connect to the sadness. My emotions had protected themselves in a place that I couldn’t access and to be honest, I still can’t.
It’s like my body had become Fort Knox, unable to be penetrated by even the most skillful of thieves.
Forty-Five
Eighteen months later I had to leave the US which devastated me. I did cry when I left the country, tears streaming down my face and I headed through security, not at all ashamed of my display of emotion.
Something about my life and the experiences I had there were hard to let go of and the facade cracked for a mere moment in time, the unknown taking me to Costa Rica.
I drifted into a depression, becoming a mere shell of my former self as I spent days lying on my bed watching old sitcoms and tinkering on my phone, only getting up to head to my teaching job and run errands.
To this day, I believe that I was being broken down to be rebuilt.
Fifty
At forty-six I found myself in the Great White North — my beloved Canada.
Surrounded by the colours of fall, the white vistas of snowy winters, and fireflies on warm summer evenings, my soul started to heal. Long languid evenings around the fire pit in my backyard drinking, laughing, and telling stories over smoldering marshmallows, my heart started to unbreak and my cells took a breath.
But the goodbyes were far from over.
To renew my visitor’s visa whilst trying to figure out a way to stay, I had to say more goodbyes.
The hardest was the final goodbye to my little travelling cat, Jaime, in early 2020. I still cannot talk about that day.
I had to say goodbyes to the friends I had made in my little Canadian city later that year as I headed back into the unknown, surrounded by restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Both 2021 and 2022 were filled with goodbyes to family and friends as I travelled through South Africa, Turkey, and Germany.
As I sit here in September 2023, I am staring down another series of goodbyes as my visa deadline looms large on the horizon. This time I will have to say goodbye to the only home I have known for quite some time, my darling little basement apartment. My housemate has decided to put his home on the market in the spring.
When I return I have no idea where I’ll go. I’m also too weary to care at this point.
The goodbyes have gotten easier as I have become more numb. I wish I could tell you that my heart is healing, that sadness has crept in and my fortress has weakened but I can’t. I live in eternal hope that it will, and soon.
There is a silver lining, however, with every sad goodbye comes a sweet hello. I have also said more of these than most. As I march toward a new set of goodbyes, I am also marching toward a new set of hellos and I hope and pray that in one of them, I will never have to say goodbye again.
Please excuse the clumsy writing in this story. As much as I tried through editing and re-writing, I just couldn’t get it right. The fortress is stronger than I thought. Thank you for reading.
Vanessa Brown is a book author, content creator, teacher, and recovering digital nomad. She has lived in six countries around the globe, five of them with her beloved Jaime, The Well-Travelled Cat.
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