Toying with Goodbye

 

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

1 Corinthians 13:11

Au revoir. Goodbye.

Only it’s not that simple, is it?

It’s grief, riddled with loss, heartache, heartbreak, and decisions that cannot be undone.

It’s not just a word, spoken in any language, for departing, for ending things.

I have had to say goodbye to much in 2020. And that included the breaking away process of the remnant possessions, representing the past. My family was threaded throughout so much of it. Likewise, so was my childhood… and its accompanying trauma.

Possessions.

Toys.

Things that have been precious, meaningful to me.

But within the past few years, I’ve been awakened to the reality that my childhood and my existing psyche, no matter what its age, are also precious and more important to me.

And so, I am caught in a whirlwind of seemingly never-ending goodbyes.

Not the first person gasping in the whirlwind, not the last.

Toys.

As a grown woman, surviving abuse and cancer, shouldn’t I be able to let go of these things much more easily?

I confronted nostalgia and painful feelings, not because I wanted this confrontation, but because I had to experience it. And it started with first thing’s first: my first doll. A rubber, chubby blonde baby that I only kept because I thought I should keep her.

Should. There it is again.

Unrealistic expectations and the fight against saying goodbye.

This first doll was ugly. I never played with her. But she was attached to the family story of how she was bought in the hospital gift shop where my mother purchased my first pink teddy bear. First. Meaningful. Connection.

The family’s account involved how I almost died as that infant. Things were if-y. Better get me baptized. Better buy the first toys before I die.

There it is. Goodbye.

I recently have gotten rid of the doll, but I still have the bear, for now. But the goodbyes don’t go away.

Things of the past. Things I was struggling to let go of.

For once they are gone, they’re gone. No going back to having them. No going back to being in my life, in the same way?

Life, now, in Covid-19, 2020 has only amplified the reality of change, loss, and goodbye. Many of us have needed to put away childish things, for mere survival. Life has changed. Death, change, and loss are here in more immediate ways.

Life demands we look at our lives, put way some things, mature, face the reality of a fragile existence. It’s personal, unique, and universal. And no one escapes it.

Playtime, indeed, has changed. “The new normal” is more than just an expression. It is life.

It’s time we stopped toying with that.

Copyright © 2020 by Sheryle Cruse