Saying Goodbye and Letting Go

Adopted from A Companion on the Journey: Heart Advice for Loved Ones of Hospice Patients

July 18, 2022

When the dying person only has days or hours left to live, this is called the ‘actively dying’ stage, when it is common to become unresponsive or minimally responsive. This doesn’t mean that they are not still aware of your presence and words. 

It is said that hearing is one of the last senses to remain. It’s best to assume that your loved one is able to hear the things you say to them directly, and may also be able to hear what is said around their bed and in their room. Try to keep an atmosphere of love and respect around their bedside.

This stage of the dying process is also the time for you to share your goodbyes. In order to find peace and open themselves to whatever comes next, it can be very helpful for a dying person if you can acknowledge with them what is happening. 

Dr. Ira Byock, a well-known hospice doctor and author, encourages using four simple phrases to say goodbye: “Please forgive me”, “I forgive you”, “thank you”, and “I love you”. You can add anything else you need to say to each of these phrases to make them personal and specific to your relationship.

The idea of saying goodbye may feel unnerving and painful, and you may worry that your loved one will think you are giving up on them. But giving up is very different from letting go. Giving up is closing the door on what could have been, while letting go is opening up to the reality of what is actually happening. 

Saying goodbye can actually help you feel more connected to each other, and this connection can be exactly what a dying person needs in order to let go.

When I was in the Peace Corps in Ghana, West Africa, I was stationed in the small village of Tongo and met Mary, whom I grew to consider as my African mother. I was very close with her entire family and her eleven-year-old son, Kofi, became like my little brother and even lived with me for a year while he was in school.

Unfortunately, after it was discovered that I had an allergy to the malaria medication, the Peace Corps had to move me to the city of Accra, a twelve-hour bus ride away. Several months later, another volunteer told me that Mary had been diagnosed with cancer and taken to one of the hospitals in Accra for treatment.

There were no cell phones in those days, so to find out where Mary had been taken, I searched for her brother, who worked as a policeman in Accra. By the time I finally was able to reach him, Mary had already died, just two days before.

I was devastated. I wished that I could have said goodbye and thanked her for taking me in and caring for me like a mother when I was so far away from home. The sadness of not being able to be a part of her dying process, especially when she was in a hospital so far away from her own home, weighed on me.

I was 24 years old at the time, and I knew very little about coping with grief. I kept trying to push on as I normally would, but I felt burdened and unsettled in my grief.

It was only after I visited Tongo, nearly a year later, that I was finally able to let go of my burden. This was my last visit, and Mary’s sons and I were chatting outside their mud hut compound in the vast, open West African savanna. We sat under the wide canopy of a tree adorned with brilliant red flowers, next to where Mary was buried. As we talked, I saw an old silver cross half-buried in the hot reddish soil next to me.

Mary was an elementary school principal and a devout Catholic. She rarely talked about her beliefs, but lived her faith humbly and cheerfully through her example. I picked up the cross and I immediately felt this was a gift from Mary. I knew she would rather show up, not as a shiny golden cross, but as a beaten-up old silver cross, covered in the mud of Tongo.

As I quietly rubbed the mud off the cross, I felt a profound sense of connection with Mary - through the land, her sons, and the cross. She lived on in them. This newly found sense of connection with Mary enabled me to let her go and feel more at peace in my grief.

Saying goodbye is not letting go of connection and love. It is a way of honoring the love and commitment to maintain that connection. When our loved ones die, they live on in us. Our love and connection continue, but in a different form.

Saying goodbye is about acknowledging the situation we find ourselves in, as it is, while affirming the depth of our connection and love. This helps us to step into the unknown where our expectations of how we experience that love and connection - like being able to physically talk with or hug our loved one - is no longer possible. But in order to learn to let go and eventually heal from grief, saying goodbye is an important step.