See You Later

Welcome to my blog, let's get the sad one out of the way

It may seem counterintuitive to write my first blog post about goodbyes. But, to me, endings and beginnings aren’t sharply contrasted and aren’t even really opposites. They fade back and forth into one another throughout our lives and sometimes they start even to feel like the same thing. So, in the spirit of that, I’m starting this blog with a story about endings.

I’ve been spending the past few weeks saying a lot of goodbyes. In fact, I kicked off this month of goodbyes with two major ones on the same day. I had the last day of my job on the 31st of January. It was my first full-time job out of college, so leaving felt like a significant milestone in my professional development. The day passed as most days there had. I indulged in my favorite hobby of distracting my coworkers with inane chit-chat and made a few unnecessary trips to the coffee shop on the first floor of our building. Around 3 pm, I had run out of work to be doing so I distributed thank you cards, gave some hugs, and made promises to everyone to keep in touch. I made a point to take in the skyline of Seattle on my walk to the bus stop. I queued up a specifically curated playlist in my headphones and luxuriated in my “main character moment” of departing. Sitting in my favorite spot on the bus, the top part where I could put my feet up and look out over Lake Union, I began to reflect on the strangeness of goodbyes. Goodbyes always feel unfinished. Big ones do at least. I had set my outgoing message, signed out of my email, and done everything I had planned to before leaving, but I still felt like something was missing. I thought about how you could orchestrate the perfect sendoff and still walk away feeling like you forgot something. It’s that feeling when you’re driving to work and know something is slightly off, only to arrive, open your bag, and see no laptop. The feeling when you know you turned off your hair straightener, but did you really? It’s the feeling that I had as I held my childhood dog’s collar on the drive home from the emergency vet later that same evening.

Shortly after I had arrived home from that last day of work, we got a call that our 12-year-old Golden Retriever, Wrigley, had collapsed at her doggy daycare. From there, matters progressed surprisingly rapidly. After what felt like an eternity on hold with the vet listening to unsettlingly chirpy jazz music, my dad and I loaded her into the back of our car and drove to the ER. She had had a similar episode a week before and bounced back quickly so I felt fairly confident that we would show up and be told we were overreacting. But when the vet tech ushered us into a bare, depressing room with boxes of tissues lining the windowsill, I lost that confidence. After absorbing a lot of medical lingo thrown at us about her heart, the cancer that had apparently been lingering for a while, and the fluid in her arteries that was hindering her body from pumping blood, we made the decision to put her down that night. We said goodbye to her in another gray, clinical room, with my older brother on speakerphone from Colorado. And as we walked out of the building, I racked my brain for what I was forgetting. I had said everything I wanted to say, had kissed her head, and held her paw but there was that same nagging feeling from earlier in the day. The sensation that the goodbye wasn’t complete yet, that somehow there was a final switch I was meant to flip but hadn’t. As I pondered these ideas for the second time in a span of a few hours, I couldn’t help but see the humor in all this. I imagined the universe possibly hearing my musing about goodbyes on the bus home that afternoon and deciding to really drive the point home. “That’s an interesting idea, Camden,” some disembodied cosmic voice might say, “here, have some inspiration to expand on it further.”

Later that same week, I flew to New York to meet up with as many friends from college as I could. That’s when the rapid-fire goodbyes began. And with each one, that same forgetful feeling. They were each a little different, a frantic hug and “take care” on the subway while someone jumped off at their stop, a 1 am Uber ride through the East Village talking about everything except for the inevitable farewell, and at the very end of the trip the last goodbye when I stood in the Newark Airport watching my former roommate and travel companion pass-through the “EXIT ONLY” doors to baggage claim leaving me to my layover. And that feeling crept up again. What hadn’t I told her? Should we have hugged for a minute longer to really seal the deal? The answer of course was no. There was nothing I could say that she didn’t already know and there was no duration of embrace that would make this feel any more natural. I was still asking myself these questions when my phone buzzed with a text from her that she was in the car on her way home. Immediately, we fell back into our constant online communication of sending funny tweets and random articles back and forth. You know when you say goodbye to someone and then realize you’re both about to walk in the same direction anyways? These goodbyes I’ve been saying have all felt a lot like that. Maybe that’s why I can never seem to convince myself that any of them are complete. I’ve begun to realize that the thing that’s been missing, that I seem to have been forgetting, is that I’ll see everyone again. Sure, they’re goodbyes but they’re really just “see you laters.” The “later” is unknown; and for now, it’s definitely a long time away, but it’s there just the same. Even the goodbyes that seemed to be final, aren’t forever. I won’t see my dog again in the same way that I had for those 12 years, but I will see her again. I’ll see her in other dogs I meet, I’ll see her in memories of my childhood, and I’ll see her when I look out at a body of water and imagine her little orange frame crashing through the waves toward a frisbee.

I have some more time left to say the rest of my goodbyes. There are big ones coming up that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about. And when they happen, I’ll feel like I’m forgetting something, and I’ll try and hold my gaze just a second longer to see if anything changes. And it won’t. But I’ll remember that goodbyes feel incomplete because they are. They’re not permanent and there’s always some kind of “later” where I’ll see them again. So, as these endings merge messily with new beginnings, I’ll just say this for now. See you later!