How to heal the pain of separation
Seven ways to say goodbye to the people you love most
A few weekends ago, our son attended Admitted Students Weekend at a West Coast university, and our whole family came along. The weekend was jam-packed with people and activities, pride and excitement. We went to sample lectures and new restaurants, we toured the campus and town, we chatted with other expectant parents (I chose the word “expectant” purposely - it’s usually used for birth, and this stage of life is a new kind of birth, even if it feels like a leave-taking.) There wasn’t much time to think.
But then Sunday morning came. I had to continue on to a speaking engagement in Ohio, while Ken and the boys flew home to New York. The way our flights worked out, they left town a few hours before I did. We said goodbye and I wandered around our now-empty Airbnb, fully aware that this was a precursor to the bigger goodbye that looms in our future, the one that’s coming this September.
And that’s when it set in: the Pain of Separation. The exact same one I wrote about in Bittersweet and now Lucky and Norman (our new children’s book teaching kids how to say goodbye with resilience).
Luckily, I recognize this particular pain so well by now - if you’ve lived this long (I’m 58) you’ve been through it many times. You’ve also learned that it will likely subside. I knew that, as soon as I was in motion myself — heading for the airport, en route to Ohio — I’d feel much better.
All of this made me ask myself what else I know, by now, about how to deal with the Pain of Separation. And the answer, I think, is quite a lot.
Here are seven of my tried-and-true strategies for saying goodbye to your beloveds: whether due to an empty nest, a breakup or any of life’s vagaries (and you can ask me, this September, how well I’m implementing these strategies!):