The end of summer is itself a good-bye in the Canadian prairies where I live. As the weather cools, and leaves turn orange and yellow in terror of the nasty winds to come, it’s time for students and teachers to head off to school again—a collective good-bye to what had been the year before.

For elementary and high school students, this is a good-bye to the freedom of holidays, but not to their immediate families and homes, unless they’re off to boarding school, which is not common here. Some will face the excitement of entering a new school, never without at least a ripple of anxiety, but the good-byes that preceded this big step happened back in June when the previous school was left behind.

 A more momentous good-bye will be said by all those young people leaving home to begin college somewhere else, perhaps in the nearest city, perhaps halfway across Canada. This is the good-bye spoken over suitcases and boxes, often with the gut-felt knowledge that home will never again be home in the same way. For the parents and guardians of these young people, the good-byes are mixed with memories of their own launching forth into the world. The memories do not lessen the ache of now.

 Thoughts of such wrenching good-byes have preoccupied me in the last days, as we think of our first grandchild, now in college, living away from home. Such a big step this is. Never mind that there have been small steps toward independence since the little one took her first shaky steps all by herself across the living-room. All those many small steps (some of them bigger ones like going off to camp for a week) happened within the context of the familiar home and the immediate prospect of returning to that home. This move is different.

            I have begun to think that our whole lives are a process of learning to say good-bye. No doubt, my status as the youngest child (by 6 years (that’s forever for a child!)) introduced me to saying good-bye earlier in life than for many. Memory snapshots come to mind: my mother crying in an empty upstairs bedroom, because my oldest brother was away from home at Christmas, for the first time; siblings packing to go away for school, leaving me now essentially an only child; the Saskatoon airport lounge where I said good-bye so many times, sometimes knowing it would be years before I saw that sibling again. Always I was the one standing at the window, waving.

Of course, my parents were also swallowing tears, pretending to be strong, but I was then too young and consequently too self-centered to grasp what it must have been like for them. I always knew—well, hoped—that soon I would be the one with suitcase in hand. I would not always be the one left behind but would be able to do the leaving. I imagined that that would be easier. After all, I would then be in control of when good-byes happened.

 Well, we can imagine all we want. Some time, sooner or later, we will say good-byes that hurt far worse than we ever imagined possible. Because of my status as the youngest child of older parents, I was almost the first person in my peer group in our church community to say a forever good-bye to a parent. I had already attended funerals of grandparents and an aunt and uncle or two. Indeed, I had said good-bye to a high school classmate, not a close friend, killed in a motorcycle accident. The death of my father was different.

            I am old enough now to have said forever good-byes to close friends, and siblings. We have given countless good-bye hugs to departing children and then grandchildren, as yet another, oh-so-welcome visit comes to an end. Whether it’s standing at a window waving at the car backing out of the driveway, or doing the driving away ourselves, those good-byes remind us of the fragility of love. No, I’m not saying that good-byes are a closure to love, never that.

It’s not possible to love without also hurting. I had not really known that until I fell in love (I didn’t actually—I grew into love, friendship shifting so gradually that I almost missed it). Saying good-bye, repeatedly, to siblings had hurt, of course, yet I never quite put that into the language of love. My family of origin didn’t readily speak of love. Not until I had finally learned how to say, aloud (imagine that!), “I love you,” did I truly begin to grasp that love makes us vulnerable, lets us get hurt.

Would I have it otherwise? No. Never.

 Do I imagine that life – and love – would be better if we all lived forever and never had to say good-bye? Absolutely not. The rhythms of our universe are built on birth, and life, and death. Beingness includes not-being. So be it.

Let me learn to say good-bye with love and gratefully accept the pain. That is better, much better, than not having learned to love.