Goodbye, I'm Coming

For me, "goodbye" has always been the hardest thing to say.

When I was 3, I remember looking out my brother's bedroom window, brokenhearted as my dad sold his diesel truck.
Dad assured me he would get a new one...
But that wasn't what made me sad. I was crying because I didn't want to say goodbye to the old one.
I remember the night when I was 5 and my grandma called to tell me that our family's boat had been through a storm and had sunk to the bottom of the lake. I wept.
She said we'd get a new one, to which I said, "But it won't have green chairs and a black stripe on the outside of it!"
My grandma tells me that I always cried when I had to say goodbye. I didn't want change...not with tires, boats, carpet, and definately not people!
One of my Japanese exchange students wrote me last year, having just been through her graduation ceremony in Japan. She wrote, "Life seems to be a series of 'hello's' and 'goodbyes.'
"It makes me very sad," she said.
I haven't found any better way to say it than that.
...

I'm reading a book called, "The Namesake," a story about a Bengali couple who comes to America to raise their baby boy.
At one point in the story, the boy's mother, Ashima, is recalling her last moments with her dying grandmother, whom she calls "Dida."
The last thing she remembers saying to her grandma is, "Dida, I'm coming." It's a phrase Bengalis use in place of "goodbye."

I like that.
I like that very much.
There's something final about saying "goodbye."
There is something eternal about saying, "I'm coming."

...I'd like to think of goodbyes more like that.