We suffer losses throughout our lives, from time to time we are forced to say goodbye to loved ones, places and situations, as we are born and must leave our mother’s womb until we die and say goodbye to life.
We say goodbye to childhood and youth. We say goodbye to parents, siblings, colleagues and friends, we say goodbye to places and times that we will never forget.
- It would be fair to say that life is a succession of ends and beginnings.
- The truth is that everything that begins must end to make way for the new.
- But we are not always ready to say goodbye.
- It does not always end.
- Not bad.
Throughout history, different societies have designed rituals, ceremonies or special acts to say goodbye, however, today there seems to be no time or willingness to do so, which makes it difficult to correctly process of farewell and loss.
One of the first acts of humanization of prehistoric man was the construction of funeral rites; unlike other species, humans have begun to make sense of the death and separation of people who were part of the environment; the first humans began to bury their dead precisely because they understood that death was a momentous event.
These prehistoric men wondered what the meaning of death was and found essentially magical explanations, assumed that life did not end there, so they designed ways to say goodbye to what was going on and comfort those who stayed.
Then new rituals were introduced, almost always of initiation: the beginning of puberty, the beginning of conjugal life, the beginning of the harvest, etc. , but, of course, celebrating a beginning also means consecrating an end, all these rituals have been maintained during they have evolved and adapted to the particularities of each culture, but in essence they have persisted.
In today’s society, on the other hand, the rituals for announcing the arrival of something new or saying goodbye to those who leave are becoming less frequent, arguably the only one of these rituals that continues to survive is the funeral ritual.
However, in the contemporary world, the ritual of saying goodbye to those who die is also increasingly in the hands of the market, not the family. Are there any, and the funeral homes “take care of everything. “
And the goodbyes that hurt almost as much as death, but apparently not as definitive, is it the case of a divorce, the departure from your father’s house or the end of a relationship.
A ritual serves mainly to mark the fact that we are facing a special event, a fact that is not ordinary and deserves an act to receive it, digest it and prepare for change.
Rituals and ceremonies help make sense of a fact. In the case of farewell rituals, separate yourself from someone you loved, either by choice or by death.
A farewell ritual allows us to recognize that something will change in our lives, that we will no longer be the same after this and that this must be resolved symbolically, to facilitate acceptance.
Goodbye means taking a new perspective on the past and the future, replacing everything usual with something new that they have not yet built, also implies the awareness of having to accept and face suffering.
Today’s society doesn’t always have a place for all this, people often have to live the drama of separation in absolute solitude, others repeat that we have to move on and that no one wants to see this person repent or express his pain.
You are invited not to cry, to try to think of something else, to do activities to distract yourself and, over time, if your pain does not heal, these people are avoided. In these conditions, you can easily move from pain to bitterness. Grieving people know that they cannot change the facts, but cannot comply, which ends in depression, mania, or difficulties with others.
Ideally, each farewell should have its own ritual. In the contemporary world, everyone may need to design their own private rituals to say goodbye, because, in general, almost no one wants to think about death or separation.
Perform a healing farewell ritual. It allows you to look at loss face to face and is a first sign of acceptance. This also helps connect cables that may be loose on the link that ends now.
You can carry a symbolic object to be consumed by fire, as a farewell sign, you can write a letter or poem to mark this farewell, the memories of those who have left can be collected and placed in a special physical place to keep them. .
All these little rituals that help you say goodbye allow you to overcome pain more integrity.