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The Importance of a Proper Goodbye
By Stephanie Kemp








Every summer my mom took my sisters and me to visit our aunt, uncle and four cousins on their Wisconsin ranch. Two weeks (if we were the best kind of lucky) of horseback riding, swimming, playing with kittens, whittling wood sculptures, playing with dolls (one cousin was a girl) and playing sports (three cousins were boys - plus their sister and my sisters and their sister were all really good athletes), watching The Bionic Woman, Little House on the Prairie and Soap (but only if the grown ups were in bed).  

These. trips. were. my. favorite.

One year (it was 1980), my mom dropped us off. We thought it was because of a new boyfriend, but learned accidentally over hamburgers and cheesy potatoes one night that it was because she was suing my dad for using her money to buy a new house for his new life. (The judge said that my dad didn’t do anything illegal, since he was an investment counselor and could prove on paper that he planned to pay back the money - with interest - but that maybe that wasn’t the right thing to do, “so why don’t you just pay her back all the money - with interest - now and we’ll call it a day.”)

Our parents couldn’t stand each other.

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This was the year I was supposed to marry the boy that asked me to roller skate with him.

I was 12. He was 13. Tracy was 14, but he liked me. I knew this because, in a rare move of romantic generosity, Tracy hadn’t pursued him upon our arrival, when I saw him talking to her while they were lacing up their skates next to each other and sharing gum.

He.
Liked.
Me.

(Ginny was too young get married, but we did bring her skating.)

You can learn a lot about a person in 60 minutes at a roller rink, especially if you are holding hands, he is the Cutest Boy That Ever Lived, You Have Never Been Mellow and you have to trust each other while you learn to skate backwards because your love (and/or your life) depends on it. I don’t remember his name, but do remember that he looked exactly like Billy Crudup in Almost Famous as a 13 year old but without the mustache. It was the best night of my entire life....including Christmas Eves.

He.
Was.
Perfect.

But then, between I Wanna Kiss You All Over and Night Fever, my aunt suddenly and forcefully made us leave while He was in the bathroom and I didn’t even get to say goodbye. My aunt had never gotten angry at me before, and it scared me. (Maybe she was tired, having had to take care of three extra kids in addition to her own four, for two weeks.)

I got in my aunt’s paneled station wagon and cried. Tracy let me sit near the window because she knew I couldn’t breathe and thought I might throw up. Ginny was scared because I was not a crier. I think my cousin Kathy was ready for us to go home to Michigan, especially now that the whole house thing had been resolved and she knew we wouldn’t have to live on the streets.

Plus, summer was almost over and I had been hogging all the new kittens.

I hoped He knew that I would love him forever.
That I had been forced to leave against my will.
That I would want him to be happy...

I was leaving Wisconsin at the crack of dawn in a pick up truck with a real life cowboy (plus my two sisters). This was the same cowboy I thought I might want to marry before I went rollerskating.

My heart still thinks about that 13 year old boy with no mustache. I have always felt certain that He wanted to marry me, too, but never got to know this because we didn’t even get to be pen pals.

I hope He still loves to roller-skate, even though I never skated backwards again.

I would never forgive my aunt.

Until her son died.

My cousin was 15 the night we came home from the roller rink and when he made fun of me because I couldn’t stop crying.

Embarrassed (and now crying even harder), I told my cousin I hated him. I told him to shove it.  

I meant it, even though I loved him to the moon and he made me want to be an artist…or a writer. (He was both. And he made sculptures that I pretended to understand so that he would think I was smart, like him.) I had never been mad at him before and was extra mad because before he made fun of me, he had never made fun of me.

When we left the next morning, I (thought I) was relieved that he didn’t wake up to say goodbye to us.

But then this cousin died in a car accident six months later, just after he turned 16 and fell in love with a girl. A girl who didn’t die because she didn’t get in the car with him after they got in the fight.

My last words to him were I hate you.

Shove it.

I hate you again.

That night at a roller rink with a boy I thought I loved and these last words to another that I loved with my whole heart taught me the importance of a proper goodbye.

But there was to be one more lesson.

When my cousin died we were in Florida with my dad and his new wife.  

It was Mom’s housekeeper who (for some impossible to understand reason, unless it was that my parents hated each other that much) told us that our cousin died. She told my dad that “it was the youngest son,” before saying the middle son’s name, making my sisters and me sit in terrified sobs (alternating with terrible silence) until my mom finally called and we heard her heart shattered voice telling us that it was the youngest son. 

My dad didn’t let us fly home for the funeral, trying to explain (technically correctly), that “there was nothing we could do.”  We didn’t know to (or how to) explain back that none of us would ever recover from the loss of this cousin or the fact that we wouldn’t be able to say goodbye and be there for and with our family.

It was the end of childhood.

My mom never forgave my dad. (Why would she?)
My aunt never fully recovered. (How could she?) 

I couldn’t (and still can’t) wait to hug my middle - and all of my - cousins.

This was the year I (actually and irrefutably) learned the importance of a proper goodbye.

And that I would need to be a grown up soon, so that I could control all of the very  most important things.