Thanksgiving is an easy holiday. The menu is always the same, and it’s difficult to mess up a turkey. Relatives and friends gather for laughter and good conversation like the “other big holiday,” but compared to that one, Thanksgiving is a walk in the park. No gifts to choose, pay for, wrap, send, or write thank you notes for. No boxes of decorations to put up and take down, and no giant tree to decorate. Easy.

Like all special holidays, though, there’s a down side. It’s fun to prepare for guests and welcome them as they arrive, but at the other end of the celebration, we have to say goodbye.

Hello, goodbye, hello, goodbye.

After a loved one dies, that one permanent, painful goodbye taints all the others. As Thanksgiving guests walk out the door and drive away, we wonder if we’ll see them again. Although this seems like a morbid conclusion to a happy day, the reality of a recent death marks us permanently. We wave goodbye with “maybe-the-last” in our minds.

I remember the agonizing process of saying goodbye to Nate. During his cancer, daily losses forced all of us to inwardly say goodbye a tiny bit each day. He did the same.

The last conversation I had with his oncologist (after he’d done all he could) involved admitting death was close. The trauma of knowing a final goodbye was just ahead was upsetting, and I was hanging onto each day like a child hangs onto his mommy each time she leaves him.

On the verge of panic, I asked the doctor, “What if I wake up one morning and find out he died during the night? What would I do!”

The doctor looked me square in the eye and said, “Consider it a gift.”

That answer was alarming. After many days of partnering with Nate as he steadily moved toward our final parting, I knew that if I couldn’t say goodbye, I’d be crushed.

As I watched him decline, gradually I saw how none of that was within my control. Only God knew the day and minute Nate would leave us, and unless I wanted to live in constant fear of missing my goodbye, I had to let God have it.

That’s actually a good thing to do with all our goodbyes. As we stand and wave, none of us knows what will happen next, but we can take comfort in knowing God does. Surrendering our goodbyes to him is simply the release of something we never controlled in the first place.

Although Nate and I did get our goodbye, if we hadn’t, I know God wouldn’t have let it crush me as I’d feared. Trusting him to tend to the details of our goodbyes (and what happens after them) gives us freedom to celebrate not just special gatherings like Thanksgiving but every get-together, all year long.

BTW, there’s one goodbye we’ll never have to experience:

“My Spirit, who is on you, will not depart from you.” (Isaiah59:21b)