My husband is a hospital chaplain and told of a man in the intensive care unit (ICU) who was dying of stomach cancer. The man had been fighting the cancer for several years, and was brought to the brink of death much faster than anyone anticipated. He had a wife and grown children, and the wife was angry — angry that he was dying and losing the fight. She wanted to be married to a winner, did not want to talk about death, did not want to make plans for when he died, did not like what the doctors were telling her, and dealt with this by refusing to visit her husband.
When someone you love is dying or has died, it is easy to get caught up in the fantasy of, “If I don’t say good-bye, they won’t leave.” But it doesn’t work that way. Death has a way of taking people away from us whether we like it or not, and whether we say good-bye or not.