Forgotten welcomes.

Late middle age is the true time of departures: children from the nest, colleagues from the workforce, and souls from this earth—each departure from our longed for permanence.

Retrospection pains. No more lazy Saturday pool days, conversations about questions legal, or chances to invest love in lives well lived. Departure days wrench me. Even with the small recognition that some departures are well taken, that some remove demands too large for the remaining circles I have around the sun, I still cling to the joy of past experience in a way that marks me. It makes me question whether I truly understood the perfection of certain moments while I was living them.

Dear friends are departing my small hometown for the place of their birth—a place they still call home, on the other side of the pond. I am gutted by this, not only for the loss of future time, but for the recognition, which comes with this age and in this soul, that more could have been wrung from our joint and collective pasts. To turn and face that strange, foregone time burns hard. I never had even a glimpse of the impermanence Bowie sang about.

And this departure pains me for other reasons. It reminds me that community takes years to build and minutes to undo; that the loss of genuine and sincere people from a small town is great and grave in ways that do not resonate with as many others as it should. These are the people you want in your community, if indeed you mean to build one. And it says something serious about that community that their roots here were not made long and strong enough.

The hundred thousand welcomes were not provided.

And the consequences will be lifelong.