Goodbye

God be with you

Today’s etymology might be one that you’ve heard before, but I bet that when you heard it, you didn’t think twice. It’s one of those etymologies that feels simple or obvious on the surface–almost like a throwaway. Look again, though, and you might find a delicious morsel to chew on. 

 ‘Goodbye’ is a contraction of ‘God be with you’. We say goodbye all the time. We say it to the checkout clerk at the grocery store, to our mother on the phone, to our dog when we leave for work. We also say it in starker times–when a friend is drafted, when a partner decides they would be happier with someone else, when a parent is in hospice. 

Goodbye might seem meaningless, a knee jerk conversational must-do. But imagine how odd it would be if we didn’t say goodbye. (I often notice this in movies–how odd it is that no one says goodbye on the phone, but rather just hangs up). Imagine if you were always in a state of leaving without marking that passage, and the same applied to those around you. One minute you’re having lunch with a friend, and the next they’re gone. One moment you’re telling your father about your day and the next it’s just an empty line. 

You could argue that goodbye in these contexts is polite but not necessary. It’s a mark of our socialisation as creatures, but that it doesn’t point to anything more meaningful than that. But let’s go back to its etymological roots and consider. 

What do we mean when we say “God be with you?”. As someone in the 21st century who doesn’t consider themselves religious, I’m sure I have an entirely different read on the phrase than when it was in common usage, but there’s still some low hanging fruit (pardon the semi-pun?) for interpretation. To say “God be with you” is to bestow a blessing, a wish for another person, upon them. It is to part ways acknowledging that you want the best for them. God can mean protection, and it can also mean the ideal; when we say goodbye then, we are linguistically acknowledging our hope that the person we are parting from is insulated from harm, and also that their actions are imbued with the heavenly. That they be good, and kind, and whatever other ideals one ascribes to God (god here understood not as any one specific interpretation, but as the thing beyond us that we point towards). In this sense, it is both a blessing and a call to action. 

There is also a third way to read it, one that is particularly poignant in the case of loss. To say goodbye is, in a basic sense, to hand off the baton of accompaniment. It is to acknowledge that the road for you has come to the end, and that your companion is travelling on without you–but that they won’t be alone. That god will ‘be with them.’ Most acutely in the face of death, the great unknown to which we naturally ascribe profound loneliness, goodbye is antidote, rebellion. When we cannot imagine the way out of the aloneness of being, we make God a companion. 

You don’t have to be religious–you don’t have to believe in ‘god’–to see the power in this statement. At base, our saying goodbye is simply a recognition of finitude. That the lunch always comes to an end, the phone call runs its course, the relationship might not last, that we will unavoidably live through the passing of people we love. By saying goodbye, we both make sacred what has already transpired, what has already been shared, and we let go of the other, passing them on to someone–to something–greater than ourselves.