The last goodbye

Kindness, reflection, and other lessons from people who leave us

I never understood the cult of Odesza.

Walking through the Eclipse Festival’s neon fanaticism, a friend and I unpack the album ‘The Last Goodbye.’ He says Odesza captures the feeling of when someone departs your life, but their imprint still remains.

People enter our lives for a reason — a karmic social contract or to impart a lesson long unlearned. Connections manifest through the choreography of serendipity and choice.

How could it be that of all the places I could have been that day, I chose to be there? Though I was unready, I curated a cast of characters that led me back to you.

We let the psychedelics talk. Among the delirium of lasers, vulnerability drips like a lazy river, thick and unhurried in its descent. The droplets we share carry the weight of late nights, tangled in the pain inflicted by others. But neither of us would trade the people we’ve met or the lessons we’ve learned.

The people who’ve affected us, they’ll always stay with you. Even now, the deep green bend around Town Lake reminds me of you.

The ones we’ve loved, their imprints hold a deep, mysterious continuity that make our lives better.

I lost my uncle David last week. He was the type of vegetarian, Tai-Chi practicing hippie who shouldn’t have left at his time. In his mid-70s, health remained his mantra. So much so, I will never forget the time he served me the driest, least appetizing buckwheat pancakes, in lieu of the sweet varietal synonymous with the morning.

Family members unanimously named kindness as his superpower.

It's beautiful to see someone who lives so authentically that their essence becomes a revelation to the people they touch. The understanding of what it means to be genuine is expanded by mere presence.

As terrible as I am at accepting breakups, friendship or romantic, I accept the Stoic surrender to death. Death extinguishes the tension between my anxious attachment to control and the romanticism that wants our connection to grow, better.

Death reminds us all is impermanent; Our time bound by the limit of mortality.

Even then, I don’t know if I’m properly grieving David. The past week, I’ve barely shed a tear. My numbness has bled into brain fog. Too many glasses of water spilled at dinner. I’m trying, though.

Through breath work — peeling away the protective sheath, layer by layer — and in this very act of inscribing my memories, I’m trying to cherish our sparse encounters.

Shuttling between the US and Thailand until college, I barely had time with my American side of the family. It wasn’t until the past two years, did I feel like our relationship began to flourish.

I last saw David at a family wedding in February. We danced to Cascada’s ‘Everytime We Touch.’ We dodged flying kippahs and sombreros vueltiaos during the horah. We drank cotton candy cocktails. I'm grateful our farewell was one of uninhibited joy.

When people come into our life, it adds to the transcript of your reality. You think you grasp a situation until someone reveals how you could course differently. For my family, David modeled how kindness should prevail over the thorns that puncture our lore: poverty, anti-Semitism, emotional stuntedness.

I often say I collect friends with fierce loyalty because I have weak familial ties. David was one of the few members on my dad’s side who saw my whirlwind of contradictions: fiery, yet sensitive. Sure of myself, yet always so lost.

Poet David Whyte writes about friendship in the vein I feel about parting with my uncle. Witnessing and being witnessed by another is a privilege.

The ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

Only by seeing another in a clear light can we see ourselves with the same clarity. Their presence is a mirror.

Death forces that interaction to end, leaving memories of the path you walked together. You see where you’ve come from and the road you have ahead, without them.

A last goodbye.

Over the years, I saw David’s maculate degeneration cloud his eyes. Although vision distorted, his spirit did not darken. More than anything, his dedication to equanimity sharpened. He tried to see and understand each person's full horizon without categorization.

In his book Waking Up, Sam Harris offers a great metaphor for seeing through frames: a window reveals the outside world while demanding acknowledgment of your own reflection.

Who are you in connection to your world?

David was my family’s window. Through his frame, we saw the world’s need for gentleness. He created space for awe from his still nature — so unhurried that we often joked how slow he was at everything he did. My uncle welcomed every bite of food with a deliberate closing of his eyes. And an extended “yum!” even to the simplest of flavors. His sentences, slow and deliberate, were always honeyed with affirmation.

It took a long time to finish a meal with David.

A quote I often fall back on from J. Krishnamurti speaks to how relationship is self-revelation.

One cannot live in isolation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself. Without relationship you are not; for to be is to be related. You exist only in relationship; otherwise you do not exist. You exist because you are related. Without relationship, I am not. To understand myself, I must understand relationship. And it is the lack of understanding of relationship that causes conflict.

He held up a mirror, indirectly asking us to self-reflect: What kindness can I offer someone with no guarantee of return? I learned from David how unkind I actually can be. For I see in myself and in others, that kindness usually curries favor. An expectation of exchange. Like me. Validate me.

David’s generous spirit flowed without much expectation of reciprocation. Kindness should be an unconditional intention.

Writer George Sand spews the boundless, free-flowing love I witnessed in my uncle:

What an age! Every one is dying, everything is dying, and the earth is dying also, eaten up by the sun and the wind. I don’t know where I get the courage to keep on living in the midst of these ruins. Let us love each other to the end.

That sounds sad, the acceptance there is finality to every encounter, whether brief or decades-enduring. But knowing we should love each other in anticipation of a timeline, that is a celebration!

That every relationship in your life is a miracle. A consolation of destiny and choice.

Love them, hold them, and learn from them. That’s all my uncle David would want, and what I know he had to teach me in this lifetime.

Thank you for the lessons and memories, uncle David