Emily has sent in her response to the latest prompt of saying goodbye.

Saying goodbye always provokes a mix of feelings. There are those which come easy, promising a quick getaway, and those which linger. Heavy, reluctant, making you wish you didn’t have to go at all.

So I looked it up.

It turns out the word never promised anything good at all. “Goodbye” comes from “God be with ye” an old blessing, worn down by centuries of mouths until it became something we say without thinking. The “good” crept in later. An accident. A word borrowed from “good morning,” “good day,” because it fit the shape. The blessing was never about how the goodbye would feel. It was only ever about carrying something forward.

Other cultures found their own way to carry that forward too. In Tibet, some funeral rites leave the body on a mountaintop, not as an ending, but a return. The body becomes what continues after it. My own tradition holds something close. Pagans close our rites with “blessed be” a blessing offered without naming who it’s for. And death, in Druidic belief, isn’t a stop. It’s a return to the earth, a passing into the Otherworld before whatever comes next.

So maybe that’s the answer. One small word, holding so much, because it was never built to promise the goodbye would feel good. Only that something of it carries on.A mix of feelings. A blessing that was never about whether the goodbye felt good at all.