Saying Goodbye

Though I ignored it, the moment has come. It is time to say goodbye. Time to halt this wonderful mix of good friends and good memories. Time to abruptly cut off what was abruptly started. It begins normally enough, if a little early. The usual morning greetings, teeth brushing, coffee. Then there are variations on the theme. Bags outside doors and the sounds of sweeping as we clean out our rooms for the last time. Instead of a line to get a plate, breakfast begins with a line to hug the cooks, and hear the tears begin to fall. Breakfast ends and the children hugging begins. The terrible hugging. Possibly the last physical communication that will ever be shared between us and these children. It starts hard, with the older boys. They barely hold back their tears, as do I. You can see the drops sparkling in the corners of our eyes, waiting to be born. The hugs continue with the younger boys, and now the heavy hitter steps up to bat. The little jokester, my tiny best friend. I pick him up to hug him goodbye, but he pushes back from me, only barely. Then, two inches from my face he pleads with me, not for candy or my watch. No, the only gift he wants is one more day with me. Though I have more than enough candy and I don’t really need my watch, time is a gift I cannot give. I hold him while he asks over and over, until I finally have to set him back down. The dam is close to bursting. Now the girls are walking down from their pretty pink house. It is their turn to try and wring water from my eyes with their little arms. Normally the girls do not hug me, and are not even that interested in me. They seem to have eyes only for the beautiful women they hope someday to become, but today they give in. I make it through most of them with a dry eye, until I get to the one that wanted my affections the most, and at last the dam bursts. I am glad she is so much shorter than me, so that she cannot see my ugly sobbing, even if she can hear and feel it. I cry and cry, as if my tears are legal tender and I can use them to buy even just a few more hours. Tears may be a currency of the heart, but time heeds them not and marches through their dripping rain. I cried not only for the present time, but also for the future. I cried for when this little girl will go to high school and prepare to enter the world. I cried for when she will stub her toe and I will not be there to carry her. I cried for when she will cry and I will not be there to comfort her. I cried because I feel like I have begun to know how a father feels. I love these children and how beautifully unique each of them is. And though none of them have even close to a drop of my blood in my veins, I have begun to feel some kind of fatherly affection for them. So I cried something like the tears of a father that will never get to see his children grow up. Even now when I picture their glistening eyes, my own eyes begin to moisten. However I do have one comfort, one hope, no, one assurance. Someday, when these children have had children of their own and are old and decrepit, they will pass on to the next world. There their heavenly father and I will be waiting, and there will be no more tears.