Say Goodbye To Someone Who Has Made The Courageous Decision To Leave

In the face of the death of someone you love, words become elusive. In the midst of the anguish, sometimes they end up breaking through like waterfalls, but nothing you say manages to shape that emptiness that twists you inside. You know that a garden of colors that has flourished inside you also dies and that there will never be someone to sow it again.

That is what loved ones are: flowered gardens that give life to your life, rain in the driest part, color in gray afternoons, shade when the sun burns. Sometimes you forget that no garden blooms forever, that some stubborn winter will always come to force you to say goodbye.

Until recently, death was a strange visitor who showed up without warning. Now it is different. Science is capable of keeping you alive, even if you are only a body without consciousness, breathing and keeping the beats in its heart. Science also gives us the opportunity to prolong pain without the hope of finding relief.

On the other hand, it is also now possible to decide the day, the hour and the way to die, to immerse oneself in a place that science has not even been able to call. Euthanasia is one of those forms of programmed death that, predictably, leaves us with no less comfort or a feeling of uncontrollability.

Say goodbye without knowing how to say goodbye …

We are all condemned to death from the moment we are born. But not knowing when we will leave is the way to open a range of uncertainties, encouraging and terrifying at the same time. Instead, when death takes the form of a specific month, day, and hour, the clock begins ticking at the same rate of anguish. One more minute is one minute less. So each shared experience becomes a way of saying goodbye.

Euthanasia is one of those extreme situations in life that put us in front of a painful paradox : love, on the one hand, that wants to respect the will of the other and must be ready to say goodbye with gratitude in the heart. And love too, on the other hand, which becomes a bit desperate when you imagine what the world will be like without that person, what it will be like to look for them and not find them, except in the dry tracks of our own tears.

Nobody says goodbye to life without sadness. Nobody makes the decision to practice euthanasia without having spent many mornings awake, looking for solutions that finally do not appear. It takes physical or emotional pain to bottom out.

The decision appears when it is known that crossing that border, one can no longer be the same, because suffering will invade every corner of what we have baptized as time and there will be no place for individual freedom. There, at that point, dying becomes an exit for the labyrinth.

“I will go. And the birds will stay, singing”…

It is not easy to understand and accept the decision of someone who has decided to die. You refuse to say goodbye not only to that loved one, but also to the idea that human beings can take control of their destiny, defining when life must end.

You find it difficult to admit those truths, because you know that with that person who leaves, a form of happiness within you will also die. Saying goodbye, then, is the beginning of an uncertain journey that leads you to anywhere and nowhere.

Every time you see that person you are assailed by flurries of panic, when you remember that they are now, but in a week you will never see them again. That those are the last smiles, the last words that you will share with her, forever and ever.

And you cry inside, so that the brave man that you have in front of you neither sees nor intuits your tears, because you have a farewell and she has many at once. You want to hug that person and never let go, but you know that your thing now is to let go.

Anguish increases when you become aware that that person will die, but not the love you feel for them. That one will survive and first it will transform into a silent lament, when you review his absence in memory, when you miss his way of laughing, or want to ask him what that person did know and you did not, or you need to feel his goodness instead of all that cold. that invades you. You understand that you’re going to have to say goodbye many times, even after he’s gone.

After the passage of that first great moment of pain, you will return to that garden that was left uninhabited and you will see, with surprise, that the flowers are gone, but not their perfume. Neither does the echo of the song of the birds, which is now music to warm your heart. Then, you will understand that there are seeds with an eternal harvest and you will say with the poet: “I cleaned the mirror of my heart … now it reflects the moon.”

PERSONAL NOTE: Have a good trip, my dear friend …