This post is dedicated to a close family friend who passed away yesterday after suffering a massive stroke. Bud Strom was a retired Brigadier General with the United States Army, a rancher in Arizona where my parents lived for many years and a well-respected cowboy poet. As my mother said in her email notifying us of his death, Bud lived a fine life. He will be mourned, missed and remembered. Our family is among many who are sad to be saying goodbye.

When I learned Bud was under hospice care, I thought back to when I last saw him. My parents had lived just down the hill from Bud and Joan, becoming fast friends, as did their grown children and grandchildren who lived all over the country. About 5 miles down the highway from their home, close to the Mexican border, the Strom's bought a sprawling ranch at the base of a mountain range. Our family had a couple of horses to add to the Strom's collection, and the two couples worked together in a communal garden, collected daily eggs from the resident chickens and entertained visiting family in a multitude of exciting ways. When my parents sold their home and moved back East, I made a final visit to the ranch to say goodbye to The General. I told him what he'd meant to all of us, saying I figured it might be the last time I saw him, which was hard for me to get my arms around. Bud was kind and open to me, as he was prone to be, but he didn't seem to view saying goodbye as something to be sad about. I told him I knew he'd spent much of his life in the military making connections and then disconnecting. He had been orphaned as a youngster which had to have impacted him as well. In comparison, it wasn't easy for someone like me who at that point in time spent my entire life in just two states, one during my "formative" years and the other as an adult with only a handful of people coming and going in significant ways. I walked away from that encounter with the understanding that Bud was comfortable saying goodbye in a way I was not.

When Ed and I first set sail in July of 2011, we spoke at length to two long-term sailing couples who mentored us in the many aspects of cruising life. One of the issues I talked about with both women was how to get accustomed to making close friends with other cruisers knowing full well it was just a matter of time before we would say, "Fair winds! Safe sailing!" when one or both of us lifted anchor toward new horizons. It's a small world, meaning we stand a good chance of seeing at least some of our friends again. But I wanted to know how anyone got used to this coming and going, attaching and detaching, temporary and fleeting world of friendships? How would we ever become comfortable with it as cruisers? Our mentors could only say, "It is often the hardest part about cruising".

It makes sense to me now, having had to say goodbye to many old and new friends, how Bud viewed this. He understood that we enjoy the relationships we form along the way. They are meaningful, rich, informative and hopefully fun or interesting. And then we leave. Or they leave and we stay. Or we both leave and head in different directions. Our hope is to run into them again, which we occasionally do. But not always. Bud knew how to say goodbye with grace and acceptance. I'll try to follow his lead, though I am woefully bad at this part of life.

As a final thought, I confess to struggling mightily over the ending of this post. If posts had minds of their own, this one would be begging off from having to say goodbye. It might fade off without a proper ending, or pretend it was in the "to be continued" category of things. We all know it has to end. We say goodbye and wait for time to bring us something new. I suppose I am saying goodbye to Bud. I think it is the only way to close.