Memorize the Air
Breaking, Acceptance and Saying Goodbye in The National’s “Weird Goodbyes”
It’s easy to hate goodbyes. The leaving and the losing, the messiness of how things end, and the uncertainty of what comes after goodbye make it more natural to focus on those negatives than the positives also inherent in a goodbye. Goodbyes mean something’s over; they mean leaving; they mean the end of what we’ve come to know as familiar and the beginning of an unknown. Something like an Irish goodbye poses an attractive alternative because it sort of stuffs the whole goodbye reality into an afterthought rather than making us go through it with the slow pain of peeling a bandaid. My family is Irish, but our goodbyes are not. Leaving any family gathering takes about fifteen minutes, includes multiple rounds of the goodbye embrace and leaves any newcomers or in-laws confused or annoyed at the untimeliness of their anticipated exit. I kind of like them though. It feels like a special time to acknowledge everyone who’s in the room in an echo of the way we greet each other. It doesn’t feel sad or even like something is ending; it’s a pause before heading into whatever’s next, a time to take stock of the people around and practice gratitude for their place.
I’ve been thinking about goodbyes in conjunction with brokenness recently; the connection seems obvious now, though it didn’t occur to me before. I came to this line of thinking by way of an inconvenient knee injury, which was likely a result of too much running and not enough time for the essentials: resting, stretching, strength, etc. It was a forced break from the way I’d been running, and it let me see how problematic that way of running was for me both physically and mentally. When I’m running well, it brings structure, solitude, sanity and space to breathe. But running can also be a distraction or escape from feeling or thinking, and that’s what it was becoming right around the time my knee called a time out. After a few days of not taking the inability to run well at all, I realized it was probably God forcing me to take a break when I wouldn’t do so of my own accord. I’d been training for a race and not feeling great about any of it. I was tired and unmotivated most of the time but still making myself maintain the miles I thought were necessary for this race to go well and for me to feel that I was succeeding. I’d let running become something I didn’t want it to be: it was a way to not think about things I didn’t want to think about, a way to prove that I was doing well even when I really wasn’t feeling that great.
I don’t like admitting when I’m hurt or having a hard time until it’s in the past, and I try to get through that valley between good places as quickly as possible without really sitting in the low place. My knee reminded me that I can’t always rush back up to what I perceive to be a good place. It gave me pause to recognize the necessity of accepting the inevitable lows and finding the value in them. So I let myself take a break from the running, and in this time started thinking about that concept of breaking and brokenness. I’d been thinking of breaking as something unnatural because breaking has most often been unwanted, inconvenient and painful. A sudden disorientation that splinters whatever known trajectory my life seemed to be on. But breaking signals a departure from a previous way of being, and in this way serves as an important purpose. It’s a breaking away and opening of a space to let go of the things that are blocking us, holding us back or keeping us comfortable in a way that limits us. I began to see that this recognition and acceptance of brokenness and impermanence was not only part of life and recovery but a necessary and important step in getting to a place where we feel whole. Breaking wasn’t a departure from my true path; it’s an unanticipated turn that only feels wrong when set in contrast with the expected path we often mistake for the true one.
The National has a song - “Weird Goodbyes”, featuring Bon Iver - that makes this connection between goodbyes and breaking in such a cool, beautiful way. I found myself thinking of breaking as a goodbye when I heard these lyrics about what it is to say goodbye, and by the fourth or fifth listen I’d started to think about what this time in my life could be. A time to let myself pull over, look at the pieces of my life that felt broken, to say goodbye to the person I’ve been and to be ready for whatever unknown lies beyond that.
The opening lines accomplish something striking, reflecting in a photographic way on the kinds of memories we don’t often register as small ways we say goodbye as we grow: Memorize the bathwater, memorize the air,/ There’ll come a time I’ll wanna know I was here./ Names on the door frames, inches and ages/ Handprints in concrete at the softest stages.” The lines are about pausing to notice what we leave behind in small, quiet ways of saying goodbye to some time or way of being that’s always slipping from our grasp. These memory markers hold places in time that can look a certain way when we look back at them. I think something in these lines recognizes that we might not think certain moments or phases in life are as notable or worthy of memorizing, some may even be ones we don’t like very much. But we add value to our present, however unremarkable it is, when we pause to commit it to memory rather than try to get through it to the next, better time. There’s also a willingness to let go of the present when we look at it in this way: as a constant saying goodbye and making space for growth.
When we pause, even when we’re forced to pause, we slow down and find those little indicators of our present state that mark who we are at the time. It might be handprints in concrete or a measurement on a door; it also could look like the length of our hair or waking up alone. When we notice them for what they are, markers of where we are in the present, we can begin to see them as weird ways of saying goodbye in the sense that they let us be present with who we are and recognize that this present can’t last. Saying goodbye doesn’t mean that period of our life is necessarily over the minute we take the time to say goodbye; it only means we’re acknowledging the temporary nature of life and our place in it and are willing to let go of trying to stop time and stay where we’re comfortable. Like my long family goodbyes, these ways of saying goodbye are pauses in which we recognize what we have and accept that we can’t control or hold onto it.
The next lines capture the feeling of giving up or just not being enough that I’ve always tried to outrun: I don't know why I don't try harder. I feel like throwing towels into water. I love the towel line. It captures the feelings of giving up in such a weird way. The towel-water relationship is typically that we use towels to dry up water, so throwing a towel into water suggests the ultimate feeling of defeat, of being so done with current efforts and not-enoughs that we let go of what we were trying to do in the first place and give in to the natural way of things. We stop trying to run, to prove ourselves, to find what or who we think we need to be happy. We just let the water drown our towel. It sounds a little sad at this point in the song, more an action of despair than acceptance, but despair and acceptance work closely together, and this refrain comes back later with a touch more acceptance to it. The lines Move forward now, there’s nothing to do, can’t turn around, I can’t follow you supply the only thing we can do after the towel throw: step forward as we are and let go of trying to do or follow what’s not ours to reach for. The goodbye comes in recognizing what we can’t do - backward or past motion - and accepting forward motion as the path available to us.
I love the car imagery that the song moves into with this acceptance. It captures both forward motion and the reality that not everyone stays with us: Your coat’s in my car, I guess you forgot it. It’s crazy the things we let go. People come into our life, and we can’t always know which ones will stay and which will leave. The ones who don’t often leave necessitate a goodbye that we’re not always ready for because that’s a break from the company with which we’ve become familiar. When someone breaks away from our lives, we can experience the initial breakage of loss and every piece of goodbye that comes when we’re reminded that they’re no longer with us. Seeing a left-behind coat is a recognition of this end but also of the fact that grief can linger even after an initial goodbye. I think grief can make us feel that there’s something wrong with us when it revisits like this long after the initial loss, like there’s something we failed to fix or missed in the healing process. It can come from small left-behind reminders, significant dates, or out of nowhere, and we can suddenly feel like we’re dipping back into a hurt we thought we’d left behind. I’ve definitely felt frustrated at myself for that kind of lingering grief, but it’s part of how breaking works. You never heal back to where you were before the break, and those enduring experiences of grief are reminders that we can’t fix ourselves and that the break has become part of how we live and love. It’s a reminder to let ourselves feel, to accept imperfection and impermanence, to pause if we need to, and to find a way forward.
This whole image of the car captures that feeling of letting go or giving up in a different way:
It finally hits me, a mile's drive
The sky is leakin', my windshield's cryin'
I'm feelin' sacred, my soul is stripped
Radio's painful, the words are clipped
The grief it gets me, the weird goodbyes
My car is creepin', I think it's dyin'
I'm pullin' over until it heals
I'm on a shoulder of lemon fields
There’s a lot in this set of lines, but at its heart it captures the simple realization of needing a break when we’re in one of those big goodbye stages of life. There’s something in loss that makes us finally stop trying and realize the need to pull over before continuing on. The radio line makes me think of how I often use music to either channel or distract me from my feelings. It’s effective most of the time, but sometimes our minds crave silence. We need to be able to sit with ourselves in quiet and really feel whatever’s going on. Letting ourselves have that experience of pulling over and sitting with whatever has led us to that pause is part of letting go of what weighs on us and what has led us to this necessary break.
Pulling over gives us the break we need from trying to do something we can’t, and it gives us the space to see beyond the road we’ve been on. I’d never pictured lemon fields until I heard it in this song, and it’s kind of perfect here. I like that it’s not regular trees or flowers in the field; it’s something unexpected that holds the mixed symbolism of being sour and fragrant. There’s potential for something in the image, but it’s also just beautiful in its own way, and that’s what we can find when we stop trying so hard to be where we’re not and pull over. That something unexpected is what we can have the grace to find and receive when we let go of our plans and efforts to push through where we’re meant to be.
The question in the next few lines reflects a lack of complete understanding, and it’s fitting:
What was I even leavin' for?
I keep goin' back and forth
I think now I'm about to see
Didn't know how sad it'd be
We may come to some understanding of why the goodbyes or breaks are necessary in life; if we’re fortunate, we may even just get to fully feel the sadness in them. The whole being sad thing isn’t pleasant and definitely not as fun as being with the people and places we want in our lives, but there’s something to be said for getting to experience the sadness in loss. There’s love in that kind of sadness, however painful it is. It makes us human and whole to feel that sadness. Losing a person, a place in time or a piece of our lives merits some sadness that we have to let in and let go to accept and move through the goodbyes in our life.
When the refrain comes back after these lines, there’s more acceptance to it than despair. Throwing towels into water is more of an embrace of the natural way of water than it is frustration with the towel. It feels more like letting go than it does giving up, like giving up trying to control something that’s beyond our power to do anything about. Throwing towels into water here is about acceptance and the kind of peace that comes with accepting the impermanent, broken nature of things. When we can do that, we can access a mindful way of being in the present just as it is, appreciating the people, places and things in our lives for what they are to us in this moment rather than placing expectations and ownership on them.
Life is a constant goodbye because we can’t stay in a present that’s constantly becoming a past, and we can’t hold on to anything or anyone but ourselves. We can’t hold onto them, but we can hold them while they’re in our lives. If someone leaves, it might hurt, but that leaving makes way for the breaking and healing that can ultimately strengthen us and lead us somewhere we weren’t able to access before. And if someone stays a constant or comes back, they’re all the more valuable for not being something we can take for granted. I’m not saying we can’t trust people or count on them to show up; we simply can’t place expectations on them in the same way we can’t place expectations on an unlived day. Even if we can trust someone to choose us or be there for us, we can never truly know how they’ll be in our lives from one day to the next. When we’re able to accept people and life events as they are rather than expecting them to be how we want, we live more deeply in gratitude and experience breaking and impermanence as part of the natural way of things. It’s not without the pain of grief or the sometimes hard goodbyes to what cannot stay, but this kind of acceptance and letting go opens up space for the unexpected and lets us pause in whatever weird goodbyes we find ourselves saying now.
