Farewell Fatigue: How to Endure Life’s Hard Goodbyes
A lifetime of goodbyes is exhausting.
When I was a kid, my family moved around every two to three years, striving for the pre-2008 American dream of middle-class upward mobility. Just when I thought we had settled down at the slightly more comfortable end of mediocrity, nearly all of my best friends moved away during my fourth and fifth-grade years. This trend continued into middle school, high school, and college.
Whenever I thought I had found a new best friend, they moved away or got caught up in a new friend group. Middle school “graduation” split us across the various local school districts. High school graduation scattered us across the country to whichever college our parents could afford. College graduation launched us across the globe to pursue careers worthy of the student debt accrued.
But life’s goodbyes are not limited to locational changes. In the uncomfortably awkward early years of middle school, my parents divorced, adding to life’s blossoming relational instability. I remember sitting on the couch, begging my dad to stay at least two more weeks because I didn’t want to say goodbye before his birthday. That same year, I went through my own first breakup (if middle school relationships still count), and every breakup since has felt like reliving the divorce.
Though we live in a highly connective age of communication and technology, where we can reconnect with old neighbors, classmates, and middle school crushes, there’s a certain form of farewell that can’t be undone by instant message or through video chat. The kind of goodbye we all are guaranteed to experience at some point on this side of Heaven. The kind I first encountered when one of my friends never returned to elementary school after a car wreck. The end of my first dog’s cancer on my seventh birthday. Watching my father cry in a pew along with his newly orphaned brothers and sisters. A text about my best friend in college, three days after our last lunch. Death.
It’s so exhausting. I often wonder, am I the only one tired of saying goodbye? Life hands us all kinds of hard goodbyes. Relocation. Breakups. Career changes. Seasons endings. Deaths. If saying goodbye is a natural part of human existence, how can we endure it?
I may sound like a downer up to this point. But I promise you; I’m here to offer us unshakable hope in times of life’s hard goodbyes.
Though I don’t have all the answers, seeing as I’m only just now saying “so long” to my 20s this year, I believe I’ve gone through enough farewells to share the constant source of my hope for surviving the never-ending stream of “see ya laters.”
Thankfully, I don’t have to rely on my own experiences and insights as we think through “Farewell Fatigue.” Saying “goodbye” is not a modern phenomenon. In fact, throughout the history of the Christian faith, particularly during the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ and the First Century Church, people had to say goodbye often. Whether through the expansion of the Roman Empire or through persecution, people of that day were well-acquainted with the weariness and burden of separation, isolation, and loss.
So, what is “Farewell Fatigue,” and how can we endure it?
What is Farewell Fatigue?
Farewell Fatigue is the mental or emotional exhaustion from the abundant experiences of saying goodbye to people we have come to know or love. It’s not exclusive to any specific length of a relationship. While it’s most difficult to bid farewell to someone you’ve known for years, even decades, it can also drain us to face a frequent revolving door of people coming in and out of our lives. For example, living in a transient city like Orlando, people come through as contract workers for theme parks and leave after a few months or a year.
Farewell Fatigue can leave us feeling drained and lonely, but it also makes it hard to trust that people will stick around. Despite the loneliness Farewell Fatigue brings, it rarely travels alone. It likes to bring along its companions, like Abandonment and Rejection Issues. Sometimes. Trust Issues also tag along with the gang.
In Churches, we often hear Ecclesiastes 3 quoted in times of grieving and mourning. It’s usually mentioned as a reminder that “There is a time for everything….” The first verses act as a list of contrasting the different seasons of life. Though, in the darker seasons of life, it can read as a list of painful reminders that there’s “a time to die…a time to uproot…to weep…to mourn…to refrain from embracing…a time to give up….”
These words are true and, in some cases, can help us regain perspective on the bigger picture of our lives, mostly in hindsight. But in the deep trenches of grief, it can feel like these verses belong on the same shelf “Everything happens for a reason” or “They’re in a better place now."
But what else does the Bible say that may be more helpful with enduring Farewell Fatigue? Most importantly, what did Jesus say that may give us hope to persevere?
Comforting Words of Jesus
In the Gospel of John, we see Jesus dealing with the pain of saying goodbye to his disciples. He knows that he will soon be leaving them, and he shares his heart with them in John 16:20-22:
"Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born, she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again, and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.”
Jesus acknowledges his disciples' pain and reminds them that their grief will turn to joy. He compares their situation to that of a woman in labor who experiences intense pain but ultimately forgets it because of the joy that comes with the birth of a child. In the same way, Jesus tells his disciples that their grief will be replaced by joy when they are reunited with him.
So how can our grief be replaced with joy two thousand years after Christ’s time on earth?
How Can We Endure Farewell Fatigue In Our Own Lives?
Remember These Two Things:
1. Though People Come and Go, God Came and Never Left.
Moses, before the end of his life, encouraged Joshua and all of Isreal as they prepared to cross the Jordan River into the Promised Land without him in Deuteronomy 31:8:
“The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.”
The same God, who created the universe, was here before you, is here with you, and will forever be.
The same God who experiences people turning their backs on him every day because He allows them the choice to do so.
This is the same God who chose to go beyond simply refusing to leave us. He decided not to forsake us or give us over to our own ruin. Far surpassing a simple turning the other cheek or turning his back while sitting on a distant throne, far removed from our painful experiences, “up in the clouds somewhere,” He came down to us. God came to dwell with us, entering the human experience as Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ experienced the same suffering and pain of loss that we do. He is not some impersonal force or withdrawn deity whose blessings and favor we must earn through our works, as we desperately try to reach him or get his attention. The Lord was so madly in love with his creation, you and me, that he desired to pursue us amid our brokenness to wade into the waters of weariness with us, even when everyone leaves.
2. Remember that Goodbyes are Temporary for Those Who are in Christ.
Just as Jesus promised his disciples that they would be reunited with him, we can take comfort in the fact that we will be reunited with our loved ones, as Paul encourages the Thessalonian church in one of his letters, so that we do not grieve as the rest of humanity does, without hope.
But even though those of us who put our faith in Jesus Christ can have hope of one day no longer having to say “goodbye,” loss is still a painful thing to go through. Whenever I feel most weary from saying goodbye, I think of Matthew 11:28-30, when Jesus said,
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
We may hear this quoted so often at church that we sometimes forget that the man who said it experienced the same farewell fatigue we share, to the holiest extent.
We can have hope because, in the middle of our loneliness and weariness, He didn’t just come to sit in the water with us while we drowned. He came to offer us his saving hand that pulled us out and removed the weight of Sin that stood between us and dragged us down.
All the things we don’t want to do but do anyway. Everything we’ve done to give people a reason to leave, or the things that have been done to us, Sin stood in the way of every one of us and God. But instead of walking away in disgust, he drew closer to pay the debt for us so that nothing would stand between us and the one who desires never to leave or forsake us.
But Jesus’ pursuit of us didn’t end there! He did not stop at dying to wash us of our sins so that nothing could stand between us. Jesus also rose from the dead, conquering the finality of death so that death is not the end but the beginning of eternity with him and the ones we love.
You would think that’s the end of the story too, but Jesus ascended to heaven, promising he’d come back one day. And in his ascending to heaven, he did not leave us as orphans, but he sent his Holy Spirit to all who believe in him so that he would still be present with us.
Sometimes, The Only Way We Can Endure Goodbye is With Open Arms
The last time I saw Steve, one of my best friends from college, we had lunch three days before he passed away. He’d spent many years in a wheelchair due to complications during a heart transplant surgery. But he was the kind of guy who had a sense of humor about it. One of the last things he said to me that day was,
“I don’t have all the moves anymore. But one of the things I’ve learned in life is, sometimes, the only move you’ve got in life is to live with open arms.”
We can live with our arms open. Ready to embrace or let go. Because, though people will come and go in life, we can find comfort in knowing that the very God who will never leave you nor forsake knows and understands the weight of farewells. You can find rest for your soul in Him until we are all reunited with those we love on the other side of eternity.
After a lifetime of goodbyes, we enter an eternity of renewed hellos!