Bittersweet Goodbyes

It’s been a tough month.

Lots of loss. Lots of goodbyes.

Different kinds of loss. Different kinds of goodbyes.

None of them easy.

Some goodbyes you see coming. You brace for them, and the bracing doesn’t help much. Others arrive without warning and take a piece of you on the way out.

I lost a friend this month. He’s gone, and there’s a hole where he used to be, the kind that doesn’t close so much as you learn to walk around it. That one I’m still learning how to carry.

I lost another to cancer. A slower goodbye. The kind you watch arrive from a long way off, which is supposed to make it easier and somehow never does.

I watched colleagues take the voluntary retirement at work. Not a death, but an ending all the same. People I’d worked beside for years, closing a chapter and walking out the door. Good for them. Quieter for the rest of us.

And a small one. A kitten came into the house and was gone again in three days. The mothers weren’t sold on it, and my son is still too young to share his home with one. The right call, made quickly. Barely a presence, and the house still noticed the absence for a day or two.

For a while I tried to rank them. To decide which loss had the right to weigh the most. That was a mistake. Grief isn’t a leaderboard. Each one asks for its own space, and the only honest thing to do is give it.

Marcus Aurelius wrote that loss is nothing but change, and that change is the thing nature loves most. I’ve read that line many times over the years.

Nothing was promised to stay. Not the people, not the seasons of a life, not the version of things I had grown comfortable with.

That’s the part I can control. So that’s the part I’m choosing to own.

And here is what I keep arriving at.

Grief is the bill that love hands you at the end. You don’t get one without the other. A goodbye only hurts in proportion to how much something mattered. The weight of the loss is just the weight of the thing you were lucky enough to have.

I wouldn’t trade any of it back to spare myself the ache.

If this month taught me anything, it’s that tomorrow was never guaranteed. Not for them. Not for me. Not for any of us.

So I’m holding the people I still have a little closer. Answering the call. Staying for the extra hour. Being there, actually there, while there’s still time to be.

Because that’s the only real answer to a month like this one. Not to grieve less, but to love more deliberately while the moment is still mine to spend.

So I’m not going to pretend the month didn’t cost me something. It did. But bittersweet is the right word, and I’ve made my peace with both halves of it.

The bitter is real. The sweet is the proof that I was here, that they were here, and that it counted.