Modern life is geographically scattered, computer mediated and subject to change without notice. When it’s time to say goodbye, tradition can’t always tell us how to say it.
On Christmas Day, a favourite aunt died. She’d been deprived by illness of her faculties years ago. We had already been forced to make our peace with losing this funny, lively woman. When it came, the final goodbye was more of a formality, and no funeral was held.
I understood the decision of my uncle, who had spent the last years caring for her, largely alone, when she could no longer do so herself. There was little left to be said.
Last month, I said goodbye to someone I’d never met. One of the posters on an Internet message board I frequent died young and suddenly, leaving people who had known him only from words on the screen in a distinctive blue font suddenly wrestling with a weird sort of grief.
The site itself is no encounter group. Its denizens pride themselves on a coarse, flame-happy humour and level of discourse about as low as found anywhere on the Net. Those who had given him the hardest time online, however, were among those most stunned by his death. The acquaintance was virtual but the loss strangely real.
On Valentine’s Day, I lost an old dog who was sort of mine. Courtesy of the jury-rigged terms of a family split, he spent his weekends with us, leaving the suburbs for a downtown apartment.
(I wrote a eulogy for a friend’s dog last summer in this column, and I promise not to make a habit of canine obits, but please bear with me.)
It’s funny how these improvised arrangements over the years can enter the very warp and, uh, woof of one’s life. New routines and rhythms emerge, and they soon feel like they’ve always been there. The apartment is too quiet now, and the leash lies on a chair, never again to promise a walk and elicit frantic jumps with its jingle.
There was no funeral, just sad practicalities. I wrapped him in a bedsheet and carried him to the car and the animal hospital, honoured to be his pall bearer.
The rituals may change, but goodbye never does.
