Posted by Elizabeth

This weekend, I had to break up with someone.  It wasn’t easy; it never is.  Of course I’ve been through break-ups before, with bad friends and best friends and boyfriends.  But I’ve never had to break-up with a 12 year-old, which just might be the hardest break-up of all.

I met my Little Sister two and a half years ago through Big Brothers Big Sisters.  If you’re not familiar with the program, it matches adult mentors with children in need of adult mentorship.  My Little Sister lived with her grandparents; I happened to be her parents’ age, so it was an easy role for me to step into.  When I met her, she was a quiet 10 year-old who liked math, cheerleading, all things High School Musical, and spaghetti and meatballs.  She had never eaten Vietnamese food or gelato, spent any time in the kitchen, or been to the top of the Sandia Mountains.  All of that changed during our time together.  Most matches barely make it to a year, the minimum commitment required to volunteer with the program, and the fact that we’d made it nearly three times as long was a testament to the strength of our relationship.

But things have begun to change over the past few months.  She is almost 13 now, a slightly moody preteen on the cusp of wearing entirely too much makeup.  Her dad is back on the scene, and I think her mom might be about to make her grand reentrance, too.  More and more often, plans are canceled at the last minute, phone calls go unreturned for weeks, and our visits are punctuated by long bouts of silence.  Some of this, I know, is being 12.  I remember being 12.  It’s not an easy time.  But my intuition told me there was something else at work.  Something called life, which has a way of changing, whether we’re ready for it or not.  It wasn’t just my Little Sister who was unengaged; my heart wasn’t in this relationship like it once had been.  It was clear to me that our relationship had run its course.   We had changed; our lives had changed.  And now it was time to say goodbye.

The prospect of ending this relationship filled me with dread.  I dragged my heels for weeks, avoiding calling my Little Sister until I figured out a course of action.  I turned the matter over and over in my mind like tumbled stones, eventually wearing the problem smooth.  I finally called the agency to inform them of my decision, who advised making a ceremonious trip to my Little Sister’s house to tell her and her family in person.  This filled me with more dread.  Why was I having such a hard time coming to grips with this particular goodbye?  Endings frequently happen in life, often times without us realizing.  People like to say, “I’m not good at saying ‘goodbye,’” but who is?  Life’s endings are difficult, even when it’s anticipated, even when it’s for the best.  Her actions told me that my Little Sister was ready to end this, too, and while I reasoned that I was giving her an easy way out, the heel-dragging continued.  I briefly considered staying in the match, essentially putting the relationship on life support and prolonging the inevitable.  But Oprah helped me to see it another way.  I was watching her farewell speech last Friday, and when she gave her answer for ending the show now, after so many good years, she said this:  “I love it enough to know when it’s time to say goodbye.”  With tears streaming down my face, I realized I felt the same way about my Little Sister.  I loved her enough to end things when the time was right in life, not when the time was right for me.

How often do we get a chance in life to say a real, honest, planful goodbye?  Not very often.  I think we struggle so much with “goodbyes” because we’ve had so many ugly ones in our lives that we try our best to avoid them in the future.  We’ve all had the experience of something ending suddenly before we had a chance to come to terms with it, leaving us feeling like the rug was abruptly pulled out from under us.  We’ve experienced volatile endings with harsh words, doors slammed, and icy stares.  But the worst, in my opinion, are the endings that fade into oblivion, the endings that never really end.  One, or both, parties is too afraid to simply say “goodbye,” and so the relationship is perpetually suspended in a state of over-but-not-really-over, where neither party know where she stands.  We think we are sparing one another something in this all-too-common scenario, when in reality the pain simmers just below the surface.  Every “goodbye” in life is a little death, a miniature preparation for the ultimate “goodbye” that we’ll all face someday; how we handle these small “goodbyes” tell us a lot, I think, about how we handle not just dying but living. I didn’t want to be a coward.  I decided that I wanted to give my Little Sister the ultimate gift that so few of us receive; the gift of a real “goodbye.”

I set about making a memory book.  I wanted to give her a concrete recollection of our time together, a place she could go to remember.  My Little Sister is pensive and cautious, guarded with her emotions, and I knew that even if she was playing tough, the conversation would be difficult.  She wouldn’t be able to absorb it all, and the book would give her something to look at later on her own.   I glued photos of trips to the zoo and museums.  I penned our favorite recipe for spritz cookies.  I carefully placed stickers and doodads in the margins.  And I wrote.  I told her what she meant to me.  I told her my hopes for her future.  I gave her advice.  I wrote her strongest qualities so that she’ll never forget.  As I made this book, I found that I was doing it for me as much as for her.  With each stroke of the pen, my soul was saying “goodbye.”  And rather than feeling awful, as I suspected, I felt good.

I delivered the book in person on Sunday, feeling less nervous than I expected, and the “goodbye” came as no surprise to my Little Sister.  She had readied herself, too.  I said the “goodbye” that I had prepared, grounded in truth and honesty, and although she listened stoically, I saw her furtively dab tears away a few times.  “Things change,” her grandma said, summing up what we were collectively feeling.  When I returned home that evening I cried, because even the simplest “goodbyes” – the ones that we are prepared for, the ones that are good – are complex.  Saying “goodbye” is never easy.  But it’s getting better.