YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO BACK TO SAY GOODBYE

Jay: You're asking one more visit to do more than a visit can do. Maybe you've already picked the day. You'll drive over, stand outside, and walk through if they let you. See it one more time before it belongs to somebody else. And maybe somewhere in that plan there's a hope you haven't said out loud. That when you do leave this time, it'll feel finished. I understand one then. I just don't know if finished is what goodbye feels like. I'm Jay and welcome back to Legacy Lines Podcast. If there's somebody in your life trying to find the right way to say goodbye, share this episode with them. Sometimes it helps to hear that there isn't one right way. There's a moment with my mother that keeps coming back to me. Her asking for five more minutes. That's what I wanted. That's what I wanted. My mother passed in July, and my father in March. Two losses in the same year, and I don't have a neat way to explain what that does to a person. But I can tell you those words over and over again. Five more minutes. When I think about them now, I hear a small request. And I think that five minutes isn't much when you're waiting for somebody to get ready or sitting through a commercial or trying to finish something before you leave the house. But when somebody you love is the one requesting five minutes and time is running out, five minutes means something else entirely. You want more time than you actually have. And I can't tell you that five more minutes would have made me ready. I I I don't know that. I might have wanted five more after that. That's where this whole idea of a final visit gets complicated for me because sometimes we go back hoping we'll find a moment big enough to hold everything. Everything we love, everything we didn't understand, everything we wished we'd said differently. We want to stand in the right place and finally know what to say. And maybe we will say something that matters. Maybe being there will help. But I remember how often we leave disappointed because we asked that moment to make us ready for a loss we never wanted. Think about a house. Maybe it's your parents' house. Maybe it's somewhere you grew up, a place you were about to lose access to. The next time you leave, you might not have a reason to come back. So you pay attention differently. You notice the doorway, the worn spot on the floor, the view from the window you walk past for years without thinking about it. You try to remember how it felt when somebody was still there to answer you. And then Then you have to leave. What are you supposed to feel when you get in that car? Relief? Peace. Something that tells you, okay, that was enough. You might not feel any of those things. You might just feel sad. And I don't mean you did the visit wrong. It may mean the place mattered and leaving it hurts. I just want to be careful here too, because I'm not telling you to stay away from somewhere you want to go to. Visit the grave if you want to visit the grave. Take the drive. Sit somewhere that helps you remember. Bring somebody with you if you don't want to be alone. There can be comfort in returning. There really can. And there can be love in it too. You don't have to prove you're moving forward by refusing to look back. But you also don't have to go because you think your absence will mean you didn't care enough. That's the part I want to sit with. The obligation we sometimes attach to love is crazy. You know, one more visit, one more conversation, one more chance to show that we meant it. As if everything that came before needs a final piece of evidence. Some of us didn't get to say goodbye. Some of us were there and still couldn't find the words. Some of us said them and they didn't feel like enough. And some of us had complicated relationships with the people we lost. There's love there, but there's hurt there too. You can't always separate them neatly just because somebody is gone. I know that much about my own life. There were painful things in my relationship with my mother. Later she asked for forgiveness and I forgave her. Both of those things belong in the story. The hurt happened and the forgiveness happened. And now I miss her. Now I'm missing. I don't want to flatten all of that into a lesson that sounds easy to follow because it wasn't easy to live. Maybe that's why I'm less interested in telling you to find closure than I am in asking what you need today. Do you want to remember somebody? Do you need to say something you've kept to yourself? Are you hoping for an apology from someone who has never been willing to give you one? Those are different needs. A visit might help with one of It might do very little for another. And if the person you're thinking about is still alive, going back is also a choice about what contact you want now. You can miss somebody and still need distance. You can have something left to say and decide that another conversation would cost you way too much. You don't need a face-to-face meeting to make that choice real. You don't. But when someone has died or a place is changing, the question may be gentler. What do I want to keep? Not everything. Not everything. I can tell you that. You couldn't carry everything if you tried anyway. Maybe there's a saying you still use. My mother used to say, put that under your cap. It's something I can carry without standing in the room where she said it. I can remember her voice whenever I I I am thinking of her. And I can decide what I do with what she left me. What I repeat, what I understand differently now, what I let stop with me. That's part of goodbye to. Living with what remains. So here's what I'm keeping. I'm keeping the love without asking it to make the whole story simple. keeping the I'm I'm keeping room. for the memories that make me smile and the ones I still have questions about. And I'm leaving room to miss my parents without treating them feeling like a problem I should have solved by now. Maybe your list looks different. You don't have to make it tonight, but when you have a quiet minute, you might ask yourself one thing before planning that trip. What am I hoping will happen when I get there? And try to answer that honestly. Because if you want to remember, remember. If you want company, ask somebody to come with you. If you need words, write them down. Keep them if you want. Read them to somebody you trust. And if you're hoping that being there will make you stop missing someone, give yourself some room for the possibility that you'll still miss them when you leave. You can have a meaningful visit and come home sad. You can choose not to go and still carry love for that person or place. Here's the line I want to leave with you today. You can leave something behind without leaving the love there. Remember at the beginning I said, You're asking more and more visit to do more than a visit can do. Maybe I need to say that to myself too. Because I understand wanting one more moment. Five more minutes. But I don't want to judge the love I had by whether I ever feel ready to say goodbye. And I don't want you to judge yours that way either. If you go back, you don't have to come home healed. If you don't go back, you haven't failed some final test of love. You don't have to go back to say goodbye. And you don't have to stop missing somebody to keep living. Take care of yourself and take care of each other because every life becomes someone else's legacy. I'll catch you on the next one.