Saying Goodbye

Unlike my unfortunate mother, who died at the age of 47, before any of her children had left home, my father had the pleasure of seeing each of us marry, establish homes, and begin to raise children. With the important exception of the last six months of his life, when he lived in my brother’s guest cottage, my siblings and I lived far from him during most of our married lives. Whereas he lived in a suburb of Boston, my brother and his family lived near Kingston, my sister and her family lived near Utica, and I and my family lived all over the place – New York, Addis Ababa, Palo Alto, San Diego, and finally Jerusalem. My father would visit each of his children and we would visit him, but these visits were generally brief, since my father, who worked almost until the end of his life, didn't like to take long vacations. Most of the time, we communicated by phone and by letter, mainly his letters. For years he wrote to us once a week, often enclosing a check for a birthday, an anniversary, or for no reason at all.

Each time I saw my father after an absence, I was struck by how much older he looked, so different from the mental image I carried of him. While it was hard to see his gradual decline, it was much harder to say goodbye to him at the conclusion of each visit. One time, when he was visiting us in Jerusalem, he worried that he might miss his return flight to Boston if he didn’t spend the night in Tel Aviv. So on his last evening in Israel, I drove him to a hotel there, where, in the lobby, I hugged him goodbye. As I did so, I wondered, as I always did during those last years, if I would ever see him again. He entered an elevator, its door closed, and I turned to leave. As I did so, a hotel clerk, who had witnessed our farewell, said “It’s hard to say goodbye to a father.”

It’s hard to say goodbye to a father, but, as I’ve since learned, it’s hard to say goodbye to a child. We have the privilege of living close to our daughter and her family, who in fact live in the other wing of our apartment house in Brooklyn, but our son and his family live in Los Angeles. We see our Los Angeles family only a few times a year – generally twice a year and with luck three times, never for longer than a week or two per visit. This summer, as she’s done for the past ten years, our daughter-in-law took her children to visit her parents in Rehovot, Israel, where they will spend six weeks. Our son will join them for the last few weeks of their stay. After they had left for Israel but before he joined them, he flew out from Los Angeles to spend a long weekend with us.

It was a lazy four days that he spent with us, a time of snoozing and shmoozing during the intervals in which he was not negotiating various business deals via the medium of his Blackberry and laptop computer. His visit gave us great pleasure even as his departure, as we knew it would, gave us some pain. As I hugged him goodbye and watched him enter the town car that would take him to the airport, I wondered if I would see him again. I used to wonder if my father would still be alive when it was time for the next visit. Now I wonder if I will. Only now do I realize that my father probably had the same thought when he said goodbye to me that evening in Tel Aviv.