Never say goodbye

One of the toughest tasks in most professional- even most personal!- areas is saying goodbye. When we go through clinical training, it is called "termination." In other words, how does the therapist deal with the end of therapy. voluntarily or not? Some are so poor at this that they don't really call an end to things, just dragging on what becomes a dependent relationship until the client discovers a way to escape. Some put so much emphasis on this that they seem to take pleasure from how quickly they can wrap things up  into a neat package; call it "brief therapy" or what you will, this focus on volume of turn-over seems to crop up in agencies dealing with the marginal population who can't afford much anyway so the business department demands as many clinical hours with as many clients as possible.
Of course, there is the reality that clients can disappear on their own. They can call and cancel their next appointment, with the place-saver proviso that they will call sometime and reschedule. They can simply not show up, and follow-up phone calls get no response. They talk about changing the regular weekly appointment to  every-other-week or every three weeks or even monthly. They talk about coming in again a year or more hence, like a medical check-up. Much of the time, I celebrate these signs of independence, but there are too many times when it is just a flight into recovery, a symptom of denial.
But it is not just in the clinical field that we have problems with goodbye. We all have problems letting go. As we grow older, there are certain routine activities that come harder and harder, if at all, and we face the fact that we might need someone else to do things for us or not do them at all. We get to the stage in life where we have to lay to rest certain dreams of youth (I will never grow up to be a cowboy!) and know that who we are now will probably be who we are the rest of our lives, for good or ill.
This does mean we should simply settle for the status quo. We need not go gentle into that good night. I remember my cousin Betty of 70-something years who was late to a family gathering because her dance class ran late (true, this woman was on stage as part of a professional magic act for many years!) Even while we accept the closing of one door, we can look for the opening of another.