Good Termination
Good Termination
Rachel Rim
On Leave-Taking and a Vocation of Goodbyes
As an introvert, I find verbalizing goodbyes to be an emotionally exhausting task. To find the right words for the right time—that is the endeavor of a lifetime, and yet we somehow expect ourselves to do it—often extemporaneously—over and over again. But by saying goodbye to places through paths our feet have walked, our minds tread familiar paths carved out in our brains. Often this requires no speech, just silence and memory and perhaps a prayer for new paths to walk wherever we go next.
Walking familiar paths is, for me, the ideal way of saying goodbye. In the days leading up to my seminary graduation, I found myself retracing the walks I’d taken during the early days of the pandemic, which marked a little past the half-way point of my program. I made my way from my apartment in Princeton past the McCarter Theatre and cut across the University’s cobbled steps, a path that had bloomed with pale pink magnolia blossoms that fateful spring, the world muted in sound and speed but absolutely bursting with natural life.
I walked by buildings and courtyards I knew by sight, through the great lawn where students played frisbee and kicked soccer balls back and forth, and across the pedestrian bridge that led to the University’s football stadium. I fingered the railing and looked down at the pristine field, remembering when it had emptied of all but a few security guards and people like me, caught in the stay-at-home orders but local enough to take advantage of the social distancing capabilities of such a huge field.
Other days, I walked along the Raritan-Delaware Canal, which conveniently comes right up to the “backyard” of my seminary’s second campus. I paused on the scenic bridge petaled with leaves, where I’d watched photographers set up shots and couples get engaged and other walkers with their dogs and children. I tread carefully on the dusty path, taking these steps as the cold set in, when the marigold and crimson leaves fell like snowfall, making every step a lesson in both music and dying. I remember walking in actual snowfall, eight inches deep, carefully following in steps others had carved out for me, turning my leisurely strolls into full-blown workouts.
I walked this path before my first semester had officially started, memorizing Greek declensions with the studious thrill of a newly-minted seminary student. I walked this path with the man I’d dated, alone after we’d broken up, and with new friends as we conversed about Christian ethics and a hermeneutic of suspicion. I walked this path in the recent months as graduation loomed on the horizon, and then as I applied and was accepted into a chaplain residency program in New York City.
*
In my chaplain cohort, we frequently talk about what it means to have a “good termination,” language that sounds harsh but points to the act of leave-taking that we all take in a thousand different forms. Chaplaincy, in many ways, is a vocation of goodbyes, and we the chaplains are both the instructors and the students, the ones bidding farewell and the ones being left behind. After all, the common images of the hospital chaplain are the Grim Reaper and the Angel of Death. And what is dying but the ultimate lesson in saying goodbye?
I remember a patient I got to know over weeks of her hospitalization, listening as she processed her diagnosis of terminal cancer. As a mom, she wondered aloud what would be the least harmful way of saying goodbye to her three young children: should she write them letters to read after she died, or should she let them forget her in peace—no words reaching out beyond the grave? The question of how to leave well, whether in the temporary or ultimate sense, is a central part of what it means to live a good life.
Of course, we often do not get the chance to ask the question of how to say goodbye—the departed leave us without warning, in our lives one day and a ghost the next. In my third year of college, two beloved English professors died within a week of each other, the second of whom had been a pastoral, almost fatherly figure in my life. The trajectory of his leave-taking felt cruel; at first healthy and robust, critically ill for weeks, then gradually, miraculously brought back to health and scheduled to teach the next semester before he dropped dead in his home. I never had the chance to say goodbye to my professor—or, perhaps more accurately, I never took advantage of the time I did have, so certain was I of his recovery that a goodbye was unnecessary.
One crisp evening a few months after his death, I ran into my professor’s widow in the stairwell of our humanities building. She had been sorting through the last of his thousands of books, packing up the ones she’d keep and leaving the rest to the school. In a couple days his office would be opened (first to his fellow professors, then to his students) to partake for free from his personal library. But knowing how much I’d loved her husband, she brought me upstairs and led me into his office.
“Choose whatever you want,” she said. “Take your time—just lock the door on your way out.” And she left me alone in the sweet fellowship of darkness and books and the presence of absence with a silence thick and gentle. Sometimes, goodbyes happen later—not so much to make the departing tender but to tenderize the departure that has already happened.
*
Jesus, too, had to learn the art of goodbyes. A sizeable chunk of the gospel of John—nearly its entire second half, in fact—can be seen as a record of leave-taking. There is the more obvious farewell discourse of chapters 14-17. But for which the prior two chapters function as a kind of prologue in which Jesus is anointed in Bethany for his impending burial (13) and washes his disciples’ feet as a way of both setting a precedent and initiating a ritual of goodbye (14). But there is also John’s extended dramatization of Jesus’ betrayal, trial, and crucifixion—in and of themselves, scenes of goodbyes.
It is striking how much time Jesus dedicates to saying goodbye to his disciples. He instills a kind of embodied liturgy in washing his disciples’ feet and enjoining them to do likewise unto others. Jesus highlights his impending death, choosing to let the disciples in on what is about to happen, knowing even as he does that they will not understand. He gives them his last words of instruction and comforts them: “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” “I will not leave you as orphans.” He gives them a departing image to hold on to, that of a vine and its branches. In what has always felt to me like an astounding gesture of tenderness, he even verbalizes awareness of their emotional limits of sorrow and confusion: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” The fact that this entire farewell discourse happens over the Passover seder is itself deeply symbolic, instituting the ritual of the last meal which the Church recognizes as the Lord’s supper.
When Jesus rose from the grave he reversed goodbye into greeting. But in what I can only imagine must have been an agonizing moment for his disciples, he ascended and left them again. This time, there is no lengthy farewell, no last words except “The Great Commission.” He has already said what needed to be said, knowing their hearts can only stand so much.
And what of our goodbyes? What of us, his contemporary disciples, who choose to follow him in our less visible, less concrete paths? Our day-to-day lives are filled with goodbyes big and small, significant and rote. We have our standard leave-takings: saying goodbye to our friends when we move, our workplaces when we change jobs, our loved ones as they near the end of their lives. When Jesus ascended to the Father, promising to one day return, he cemented the art of leave-taking as something we all must learn.
But for any of us who have walked with Christ, we know another kind of leave-taking: we must learn to say goodbye to the Christ we thought we knew, the Christ we thought we understood. We must learn what it means not only to have a Lord who died, but to die with him and to ourselves, undergoing the sorrow of that departure. There is a kind of deathliness to our spiritual lives—a necessary process of termination we must regularly undertake in order to learn what it means to be reunited, renewed, and baptized from death into true life. Perhaps if we do not find the need to say farewell every so often to the Christ we thought we knew and understood, we are not examining ourselves seriously enough—after all, the disciples were instructed to say goodbye to their image of Jesus time and time again.
*
On a train back to New York City from Providence, I stare out the window at gleaming harbors and, again, reflect on the theme of goodbyes. It feels particularly resonant, both in the concrete sense as I’ve just left my position at Columbia hospital to begin a palliative care fellowship at another hospital, but also in the spiritual sense as I reflect on the past decade of my life. I grew up in the Korean immigrant church, immersed in my early years in the cultural flavor of Korean-American Christianity. I attended a small Christian college liberal arts college in the Midwest, trading in my small immigrant church context for a broader, yet similar, evangelical environment. I spent the first 24 years of my life in these communities—going to prayer meetings, listening to forty-five minutes sermons, holding staunchly to my theological views on various cultural hot topics.
Then I went to seminary at a mainline Presbyterian institution on the east coast where I encountered a starkly different way of inhabiting one’s Christian identity—one where prayer meetings, if they occurred at all, must have occurred in secret; where sermons were twenty minutes if the pastor was pushing the limit; and where the polar opposite of most of my theological views formed the majority opinion. I became acquainted with the idea of a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” watched women preach for the first time, and learned about how white colonialism was inseparable from church history. I spent three disorienting years in seminary and then spent the last fifteen months finding my way into a kind of “no man’s land” of middle-ground spirituality—not quite evangelical and not quite mainline. It can be lonely here sometimes, but it is a place I feel I can occupy with spiritual integrity.
Living on this island, I often feel the grief of termination—not so much for people who have passed or relationships that have naturally faded, but to a faith tradition I was once steeped in, a faith language I was once fluent in. I miss the confidence I had in so many of my beliefs, a confidence not born in certainty but in everyone around me professing the same thing. I miss Jesus—the form of him I encountered through retreats and worship nights, mission trips and Bible studies. I have realized that I will not be able to fully welcome and embody any new church community, any new faith cadence or language, any new and profound ways Christ is working until I learn how to say goodbye to the ones I’ve let go.
This process of death is one we all must learn, and it can be frightening. It involves a risk greater than saying goodbye to our loved ones, our jobs, or our health. Yet leave-taking is a necessary art; it can even be a gracious one. Such undertakings are not instantaneous; they happen in layers over years of practice. With each goodbye we find ourselves hitting a new layer until slowly termination becomes an invitation. Paradoxically, the art of leave-taking leaves us with more, rather than less. Loss is transformed into surplus by a Savior who said goodbye in order to bring us into deeper life, resurrecting even the most sorrowful goodbyes into generous gifts.
Rachel Rim
Chaplain & Writer
Rachel has been published in Kodon & Prairie Margins
Photography by Ekrulila