Saying Good-bye

The other day I was thinking about the custom of saying goodbye. I've been told that not every culture does it. I guess in some places one person just turns around and walks off without uttering a word of farewell. That would seem kind of weird to me. 

But the very act of saying goodbye can have sort of built-in difficulties. You have to leave a friend’s house. Saying goodbye can be tricky. You really have to go, but on the other hand you don’t want to look as though you’re rushing off. It has to be a reluctant goodbye. It takes some thespian training.

There is this problem of saying goodbye to a loved one just before his or her death; a final farewell with the emphasis on “final”. If a person says goodbye to someone who is on the brink of death, the dying person then knows that as far as his life goes, it’s curtains. In essence the dying individual has been told that he might as well give up the fight; he’s finished. So, do you really want to tell a friend or loved one that he’s kaput? As noble and emotional as it sounds, saying goodbye in such cases can almost be an act of cruelty. It certainly is not always feasible.

I sometimes call my telephone answering machine when I want to remember something later on. No one uses, or listens to my answering machine but me, so I can say pretty much what I want when I call it. In fact, not long ago I telephoned my answering machine concerning my thoughts on saying goodbye. When I had finished my brief recording, I automatically said goodbye. Before I said goodbye I politely babbled, “I’ll talk to you later.” Of course the second I said these things I realized how dopey it was. It kind of reminded me of the guy who sends me emails and as a greeting writes what period of the day it is when they are composed, such as "Good Evening". I'm left to wonder if there is something in his brain that thinks I'm reading his words at the same time he is writing them. 

I was at a friend’s house recently when she had trouble with her landline telephone. I messed with the phone a bit and then used my cellphone to call her number, just to check on her phone. The telephone rang, she picked up the receiver and I began talking to her from a few feet away via my cellphone. Everything seemed to be working normally. So with my friend looking me in the eye from five feet away, she said that she was going to hang-up which was then followed by the compulsory, phone-conversation-finis of “goodbye”. The slight misuse of her final word had me chuckling. Of course I would not have found it so amusing if I were on my deathbed.