What can we say besides goodbye

What can we say besides goodbye, which seems not quite right for one who now is more present than ever?  Our eyes haven’t yet learned to recognize the new versions of your old form, but you will be a patient teacher. You have always been a patient teacher.

For a time, we thought of you as timid but realize now that wasn’t the half of it. It was just that you needed to interact with this bold, boisterous world on your own terms. When it forced itself on you like a salesperson with a quota, you stepped out of the fray, protected your serenity, anchored yourself to calm. It wasn’t as much about feeling uneasy as it was about needing tranquility. Buddha-kitty, peace-seeker, meek but not without courage.

We always said you were the softest, and the prettiest, and shush, don’t tell. Well, no more secrets. When you see the others out there, in that full breath of being that you all move through together now, they will already know. Because that’s what happens, isn’t it? The only real difference between being here and being everywhere is in the knowing.

We don’t love someone more. That’s not how love works. Softer, prettier, scrappier, funnier, rounder, sleeker, more delicate, more daring, clumsier, quirkier. Matchless - each one in turn. Love is liquid. It takes the shape of the vessel into which it is poured, filling every void, even the spaces that are hard to access. It flows into the in-betweens. It is incapable of anything else.

We didn’t love you more, but we did love you longer, at least when it comes to the kind of loving at which we are most practiced, here in front of us, with huge green eyes, and speckled toe beans, and tiny bursts of communication. We loved you reserved and unassuming. We loved you gentle and with so much humility. We loved that you never expected too much out of anyone, a realist, perhaps, our no-drama queen. We loved you so long that we weren’t ready to listen when you first told us it was time to move on. But, again, you taught us well.

What can we say, now, to honor how not-at-all-gone you are, when goodbye feels limited and lacking in the true tenderness of you? Only this: We will look for you among the wild things, friend. And, we will see you soon.

Nutmeg: July 17, 2006 - May 5, 2023

~Elizabeth