the slow goodbye

Some relationships end clearly.

An event, a word, a shift and you know it’s over. These are painful endings but you also have a shared understanding of closure.

The more painful endings are the slow goodbyes.

Traditions change ever so slightly.

The phone rings just a few times less.

Thoughts no longer shared in late night texts.

Less questions asked.

Life events go unacknowledged.

You notice a stretch of distance, inches that increase by the day. The one who knew every detail of your life begins to know only the rough outline. “Your person” becomes a present day stranger with echoes of the joyful memories left to haunt you.

The hardest part is the in-between.

The time when one of you is still trying.

Or maybe both of you, but not well.

Politeness, pleasantries and surface conversations replace those that used to fill your heart and reveal your soul.

You mourn for something that isn’t really gone but definitely is no longer there.

It feels different than those relationships that are maintained for years even if you barely speak. Those don’t come with pain, just an understanding that the rhythm of connection will be different.

No, the slow goodbye is different.

It’s being witness to the slow death of a shared life, without the promise of a funeral. There will be no processing of the grief, no eulogy for the beauty of what once was.

Just a whisper of a goodbye until it becomes silence.