EDITOR'S PERSPECTIVE: Is sorry really the hardest word?

I think he’s had a decent stab at an answer there, as it is pretty hard to say, especially when you don’t think you are in the wrong but have reached the conclusion it may be prudent to say you are anyway. Also, he also only goes so far as to say it seems to be the hardest.

However, I would choose goodbye when used as a finality.

When getting someone off the phone or out of your house, it’s pretty easy. Not difficult after a night out with friends either, but as an ending, definitely.

There seems to be sections in life when it’s all you do. Your job goes, your relationship, someone close to you dies.

I don’t believe things happen in threes, at least not always, but they do sometimes and with them everything and every one you fought for and believed in.

The three mentioned above happened to me around 20 years ago and it felt as if everything was coming to a conclusion. Similarly, around seven years before that, it was job, relationship and any shirts that weren’t pink following a washing error – it turns out you don’t put red and white in together.

You can over analyse the downsides of goodbyes and sometimes they do happen for a very good reason and lead to a not always anticipated but much better hello.

Whatever part of your life is concluding, today it may not appear as a positive, but tomorrow well, maybe it will.

Albert Camus said life was meaningless, yet we should fight its absurdity or at least live with it, not seek a way out, but pour scorn on it.

He was right. Your rock may be at the foot of the mountain, but you push again and just when you think you’re nearing the summit, down it goes and, laden with all its negatives, not far behind it, that sense of an ending. That long goodbye. Quick in the time it takes to utter the word, but not in living it.

I feel it now. Today. An ending. Not the ending, but an ending, and I know I have to turn it into a beginning. Will it be a beginning I want, though? Does it even matter one way of the other? Not in the grand scheme of things.

It feels more real than the previous endings though and I think that comes with age, but there is, usually, a way through and I know I must search for that even though other endings are rushing my way.

Most goodbyes are little more than a word or two, maybe a sentence long. This is way longer than that and I don’t actually want to say it, so I will leave with the word sorry, though I’m not really.

It looks as if Elton John was correct after all and that’s not a sentence I thought I would ever have to type.