This poem is a tribute to anyone who has lost someone they loved. This year has been full of young lives lost, as well as full lives completed. Where grief resides, may there also be peace.
Goodbye. This isn’t for you, because you’re gone. It’s for me, because I’m left here with not you, but a shell of memories, beautiful and unique. There is no thing that could make this goodbye easier, there is no thing that could bring back normality. Normal will not return, but change. Once routine comes back into play and I start to come to grips with the fact that your voice will not be there to tell me good morning or that that shirt really doesn’t compliment me; That might be the time that normal is rewritten, but not the same, come sun or come rain, life has changed.
Goodbye to the things you did in secret or at least the things you thought no one had seen. To the infection of laughter in the way only you could bring. Our laughter will not cease, but it will never be the same. The jokes you told will be infused with longing, and remembering. It will no longer be just a joke or a quote, but a cherished moment in time, internally narrated in your voice.
Oh your voice, I want to remember it. Please, God. I don’t want to say goodbye to your voice. I know I will always recognize it, if technology replays it, but I don’t want to forget the way you said my name. The way it sounded when you were sick, or laughing, or when you sang; and not just on stage, but how you sang in the shower.
Goodbye is such an intimate word, and I utter it at a time, by you, it will not be heard, and if goodbye is forever, I may not bare the pain of it, but if goodbye is truly temporal, (and between us, I fully believe it is) then I can only wait until we meet again, and the hello will be sweeter than my hello has ever been.
What Matters 