Full of endings

"Things are not easy for anyone, inside that igloo, so thawed, so long, so full of endings, so deprived of you," sings Antònia Font. What a gift Joan Miquel Oliver has for creating images, for suggesting moods and for playing with words! I find it difficult to find a more synthetic and accurate definition of life than that igloo so full of endings.

We grow older and it becomes increasingly difficult to fight against this feeling that we are constantly saying goodbye. To people, to places, to experiences. Time flies furiously in the opposite direction and we move further and further away from that person who had a very long road ahead of them, when everything was discoveries and possibilities and beginnings and knowledge.

It is difficult to let go of things, as if you were stripping and leaving a trail behind. But – I suppose it is the law of life – in the end you end up getting used to it. I won't say that saying goodbye ends up being easy, but we are hardening ourselves – very well, like scars harden the skin.

A dear person recently died, a woman in her nineties. When I heard this, I thought of the dismay her lifelong friends must have felt. I asked the children of one of these friends: How did the mother take the news? After a brief, meaningful silence, I received an answer I had not expected. "She just said: 'You see, she was already very old.'"

The children reproduced the reaction of their mother – barely a couple of years younger than the deceased – certainly stupefied, but with a smile that escaped from under their noses. It was difficult not to see the funny part: this older woman, who had lived through all kinds of things, naturally accepted the death of her friend and, out of pure survival instinct, distanced herself from her. Just because she died does not mean that I should die.

Endings – goodbyes – accumulate in our inventory, and even though they still hurt, they no longer destabilize us. We accept them because "it's the law of life," just as we accept that we can no longer learn to ice skate, that we will no longer visit Australia, that we will never fall in love. Everything ends, even what we thought would last forever. We regret it, add another spoonful of sadness, and move on.

I have always been puzzled by people who leave places without saying goodbye because they "hate goodbyes." Obviously, it's not nice to let go of what we love, but that's precisely why I need goodbye rituals. Sometimes, closing chapters, leaving a place behind, losing contact with someone, makes you stop being a little bit of the person you were. And at the same time that you say goodbye to what you lose, you must recognize that new person you will be without what has disappeared from your life.

So we do that voluntary exercise of thinking that changes usually end up bringing good things. That maybe this was what had to happen and it's better this way. That everything happens for a reason. But in the end you already have a hole inside you that you didn't have, which makes the emptiness that you've already accumulated bigger. This, life is a place full of endings.