Saying goodbye never gets any easier

We are not hard-wired to say goodbye to the people we love.

We are genetically programmed to reproduce and to defend our offspring. Some geneticists even believe we are pre-wired to learn to swim, skate and bicycle at surprisingly early ages. However, nothing seems to make it easier for us to say goodbye to our parents, children or spouses. No matter how many times we do it.

Does the most painful goodbye occur when you leave your children at a camp or with their grandparents for the very first time? Maybe. But that’s only because when you’re driving away, you’re not sure you will survive. Despite saying goodbye so many times to children, nothing prepares us for the day they leave home for college or their first job.

In a few days, many parents will take and leave their children at college for the first time. Parents who cherish their children have felt a lump in their throats every time they tried in vain not to think that this day would arrive. As they finish helping unload the car and set up the dorm room, parents will not be sure whether to drag out the time or leave as quickly as possible.

Of course, you’ve said goodbye before, so when you’re driving back home without your child, you know you will survive. You’re just not sure how.

No, it does not grow easier. We just aren’t programmed to say goodbye. I now understand my father and father-in-law better. Both of them began working in their gardens early on the mornings Patty and I packed our children into the car to leave. At the time, I thought they were incredibly industrious. Now, I know they were working through their tears. Saying goodbye killed them a little bit each time.

All of us develop “tricks” that we hope will make it easier to leave or be left. But over time, nothing really helps us leave the people we love.

The famous stages of “Death and Dying” described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross map out the process dying people go through to say goodbye to everything and everyone they hold dear. The final stage, acceptance, is not one filled with contentment or happiness, but is one where nothing is felt. Letting go is so difficult.

As you prepare to say goodbye to your children, you will try to be tough, brave and unemotional. But long before you pack the car, you will feel a “presence of an absence,” as the psychologist Erik Erikson once called it. And, later, when you return home, that presence of an absence will lurk behind every door.

Time passes. You will eventually hear how happy your children are. You’ll spend more time with the people at home whom you love. And, you will survive. But the next year, when you take your child to campus, the cycle begins again. Of course, now you know you will adjust. But you will also wish that we had been better programmed to say goodbye.

- West is a professor at Lynchburg College. His book, ‘The Shelbys,’ has been translated into Indonesian and Czech. Readers may write to West in care of The News & Advance, P.O. Box 10129, Lynchburg, VA 24506.