The First Good Bye

Like most of us, I don’t conceive of myself as someone particularly good at goodbyes. In fact, I’m pretty abysmal at them. I mourn the loss long before it happens and I often end up ruining the last few months (or even year) I have with a person.

Each time we hang out, I can’t escape the barrage of morbid thoughts. For example: This is the last time I’ll be riding in their car and I wonder if the next person will know how the vent on the passenger side has a dent in it so you have to tweak the fan to get it to blow hot or if they’ll just sit there shivering in the cold. I obsess about the fact that I’d better do laundry soon so I can be sure to give back that t-shirt I borrowed. I troll my computer for photos, only to find that we never did carry a camera around with us often enough and the one I do have of us together is out of focus with a neon sign in the background looking like its growing out of both of our heads.

Afterwards, like an Aborigine, I avoid saying the person’s name completely and I hide those few scraps of photos in a file so that they won’t accidentally popup on my screen saver. I do my best to wall myself off from memory, until one day even when I want to, I can’t.

Each time I say goodbye (it is, after all, one of life’s few certainties), I hope (pray) that someday I’ll learn to be better at it. Yet, each one is somehow more painful than the last.

So you can imagine how awful I thought the experience would be for my daughter Sophie when this past month we had to say her first goodbye ever to her daytime caregiver, Annie.

For nearly the first year and a half of her life, Sophie had spent three days a week with Annie. Together, they had shared a countless number of firsts -- Annie had taught her to sign “please” and “more” and how to blow kisses; Annie put her hair in pigtails for the first-time; Annie was the first adult (outside of my husband and myself) to show Sophie love and kindness on a near daily basis. With a kind of cruel symmetry, Annie would, of course, be her first goodbye.

Just as aptly, I dreaded it.

As is my habit, leading up to the moment, I spent untold hours talking (and crying) over the pending loss with my husband and with my friends who’d listen. I wanted it to be a good goodbye for Sophie. I didn’t want to color it with my own fear and negativity. Only I didn’t know how to make it one.

Should I put up photos of Annie? Of course, we didn’t have hardly any of the two of them together so I rushed to take them and put them up only to worry and obsess that I should take them down. Should I ask her for some scrap of clothing that would have the scent of her? Should I make sure we didn’t use the same shampoo, just in case the smell would make Sophie suddenly sad? Should I change my driving patterns to avoid the North West side of town, especially City Park where they played almost every afternoon? (The only experience I had with Sophie saying goodbye were the ones of me crying my own head off out front of Annie’s apartment in the early days of dropping Sophie off.)

The consensus of these conversations was that Sophie would hardly notice. Everyone said without a doubt that it would be more painful for me than it would be for her. Great, I thought, this was supposed to be a comfort?

Yet, a child has a way of being so wrapped in a moment that it forces you to be there with them, so I didn’t have the chance to dwell on my usual this is the last time I’ll be climbing down these steps leading from Annie’s apartment. I was too focused on helping Sophie toddle unevenly down them and too overjoyed by the smile of pride on Sophie’s face when she finally took the last two independently.

When the real last day came, Annie and I cried together on my living room floor while Sophie crawled over both our legs asking for crackers.

But then, maybe a week or so later, we were driving on a country road flanked on either side by the burnt gold of cut wheat and just as clear as day Sophie shouted out Annie’s name followed by “Yeah!” and held her hands up high above her head with a giant smile. There was no one walking in the field, just a few birds gathered and pecking at the ground.

I can’t say what it was that reminded Sophie of Annie in that moment. She wasn’t calling out either in that pained and desperate way a child calls for something because they have no idea yet that life doesn’t always deliver exactly in the way they want it to. Just “Annie, Annie!” followed by a pearl of a giggle.

My breath caught in my throat as I waited for the call to turn desperate. I gripped the steering wheel hard and wondered if I’d have to pull over to sooth her if she started to bawl. I cursed myself for taking this back way home on a road without a good enough shoulder.

To my surprise, Sophie continued laughing and babbling with Annie’s name interspersed. Finally, glancing furtively in the rearview mirror for the telltale collapse of her face before she breaks into breathless hysterics, I asked, “Are you thinking about Annie? Are you thinking about feeding the ducks? That was fun wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” she answered and continued smiling and looking out the window. Although, I can’t really say if either of us really understood what the other was talking or thinking about. I’m not going to claim my seventeen-month-old as a genius just yet.

Yet, it went on like this for the next couple of weeks. We’d be driving somewhere or at the park or the library or in her room at night getting ready for bed, and she’d just start talking about Annie. Maybe it was a place she’d been to with Annie and maybe not. Regardless, Sophie would just start saying her name.

So, we’d talk a while about a possible memory or imagine what Annie might be doing now in her graduate program halfway across the country. Sophie would smile and babble back her answers.

What is amazing to me is that these conversations never turn sad. Sophie points to the photo of Annie we decided after all to leave up on the bulletin board in the kitchen. She mimics the face they are both making, a surprised “oh,” which of course forces me to mimic the “oh” until we are both laughing.

After all this time, my daughter has finally taught me what it takes to say a good goodbye, to find joy in the face of a loss, laughter in a memory -- a first, for both of us.