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How do you say goodbye? « The Story's Story

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I’ll admit a disappointing answer up front: I don’t know. Because I’m dying, I’ve been saying goodbye a lot, but even after a bunch of practice I still don’t know how to say it. Humans have to learn how to say all sorts of unpleasant and unhappy things; as I write this, terrorists have broken into Israel and murdered hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians. Someone will have to call their families and say: “Your brother | sister | son | daughter | cousin | friend is dead.” One Israeli 13-year old’s whole family was murdered. Someone had to tell him. And then time continues its perpetual beat, and the people who’d been living and animate will transition from the small percentage of humans who are alive to the much larger percentage who are not. I get the relative luxury of saying goodbye, of thinking about how it should be done. I wrote in “How do we evaluate our lives, at the end? What counts, what matters?“: One estimate finds that about 117 billion anatomically modern humans have ev

October 16, 2023 By Jake Seliger in Essays , Personal Tags: cancer , Essays , personal 5 Comments I’ll admit a disappointing answer up front: I don’t know. Because I’m dying , I’ve been saying goodbye a lot, but even after a bunch of practice I still don’t know how to say it. Humans have to learn how to say all sorts of unpleasant and unhappy things; as I write this, terrorists have broken into Israel and murdered hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians. Someone will have to call their families and say: “Your brother | sister | son | daughter | cousin | fri

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