I am sitting in a restaurant I like, waiting for something involving fancy mushrooms. Work is finished, the evening is mine and RAYE’s Goodbye Henry is playing through my headphones. It is a brilliant, tongue in cheek breakup song. There is pain in it, but also clarity, humour and the unmistakable sense that it is time to say goodbye properly.
It made me wonder why the end of a relationship is treated only as a death to be mourned. Why can it not also be a life to be celebrated?
The funerals I grew up knowing were centred almost entirely upon loss. Grief was expressed with the full force of the knowledge that somebody was gone. Later, I attended funerals in Caribbean communities and encountered something different. The grief was just as real, but it existed beside music, food, dancing and togetherness. A person’s life was not reduced to the fact that it had ended. People gathered to remember that this person had lived, loved, laughed and occupied a place in the world that nobody else could fill.
Perhaps relationships deserve funerals like that too.
An ending does not make everything that preceded it meaningless. Nor does it prove that we were foolish to believe in what we felt. Some people enter our lives, awaken parts of us that had been sleeping and introduce us to worlds we might never have found alone. They may still not be the people with whom we can build a lasting future.
We could acknowledge the pain without turning it into the only truth. We could gather the memories, play the music, eat something delicious and give thanks for whatever was genuinely good. Then we could dance, say goodbye and let the ending remain an ending.
Recently, I went to an Amy Winehouse tribute concert. When the singer began Love Is a Losing Game and reached the words, “Oh, what a mess we made,” something in me opened. The sentence was so simple and so accurate that the emotions I had been containing came out of hiding.
A friend noticed me trying to conceal my tears and quietly put her arms around me. For a moment, I felt embarrassed to have been seen. Then I thought, yes, this is me too. Strength is not the absence of emotion, and composure is not the only respectable way for a woman to exist.
So I cried, wiped away the tears and continued dancing. The emotion did not defeat me or ruin the evening. It passed through me and became part of it. We are capable of crying and dancing within the same song. Thank goodness for that.
There was a time when I thought an ending required a verdict. Either the relationship had been beautiful and therefore should have survived, or it had ended and must therefore have been a mistake. I no longer think life is that tidy. Something can contain genuine affection and still become impossible to continue. A memory can be precious without becoming an argument for returning to it.
Nor must everything painful be transformed into a gift. I do not need to claim that every experience was necessary or that I would willingly repeat it. Some lessons were more expensive than they needed to be. The fact that I learned from them does not make the cost desirable.
What matters is that I can keep the knowledge without keeping the relationship. I can recognise what was beautiful without using beauty to excuse what was not. I can accept that something changed me without allowing it to continue changing the terms of my life.
It turns out that I live rather like I read. Some people keep their books immaculate, with perfect spines, clean margins and pages that appear untouched. I bend mine back so I can hold them in one hand. I underline sentences, write in the margins and return to the pages that made me think. By the time I finish a book, it carries evidence that we have met.
Apparently, I approach life in much the same way. I do not want to remain pristine merely so that nobody can say I have been marked by experience. I want to reach the end knowing that I entered fully, paid attention and allowed life to affect me.
But a well read book is not the same as a destroyed one. Living fully does not require remaining where dignity, safety or trust are being lost. There is no virtue in suffering merely because suffering proves that the feeling was serious. Love may ask for courage, honesty and vulnerability. It should not require self abandonment.
Every meaningful relationship has shown me something. Some introduced music, places, ideas and ways of seeing that remained long after the person left. Some taught me tenderness. Others taught me boundaries. None needs to be declared entirely wonderful or entirely worthless before I am permitted to move forward.
Perhaps maturity is learning that gratitude and discernment can exist together. I can be grateful for what a chapter contained without wishing it had continued. I can respect the woman who tried to make it work without asking her to keep trying forever. I can leave without pretending that nothing mattered.
My life has not been suspended between relationships, waiting for one of them to provide the correct ending. It has been happening all along. Work, friendship, travel, books, music, ordinary evenings and the person I continue becoming are not background scenery to a love story. They are the life itself.
I would still like to love again. I have not become cynical about love, only less willing to confuse its intensity with its quality. I want something in which affection and reality agree, where neither person must become smaller to preserve the relationship. Until then, my life is not an unfinished sentence.
There is a strange freedom in understanding that the past does not need to be prosecuted or defended. It can simply be placed where it belongs. The beautiful parts can remain beautiful. The painful parts can remain true. The ending does not need to alter either of them.
So tonight, I am not mourning one relationship or declaring love a losing game. I am celebrating every version of myself that loved, learned and eventually knew when to leave. I am celebrating the fact that an ending can close one part of a life without diminishing the life around it.
We can leave without denying the pain, rewriting the past or carrying its bitterness into the future. We can honour what was beautiful, accept what could not remain and, in the spirit of Goodbye Henry, leave with one final wish:
“I wish you only love and happiness.”
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