There's a little saying: "Life is full of hellos and goodbyes." Now, there's also a basic teaching within Buddhism: the people you are closest to, you're going to meet again in a future life. Ahhhh, that sounds nice. That means the people that you really love, the people whom you're closest to, saying goodbye to them today, even if they die tomorrow, that's not the end according to Buddhism in the big picture. The big, big picture is like thousands of lifetimes. Yeah, it's huge. These little short seventy, eighty, ninety years, whatever we're going to have. You might only have thirty. I don't know. But this little short time frame is so little in the big picture.
In the big picture, even if you live 70 years, how does that look like in the big picture compared to living seventy years? Well, it might be like half an hour. You know, are you really worried if you're separated from your loved ones for half an hour and then you see them again, does that bother any of you? Even when Rosemary and I were dating in the beginning and we really wanted every minute to be together, we couldn't. She had to go home. I had to go home. I'd have to go to work. Things happened and we couldn't be together. But I dare say, if I only had to miss her for half an hour that would've been a lot nicer then missing her for ten hours straight.
So when you look at the big picture, and this of course is theory -- it's nothing we can prove -- but it does give some reassurance that if the big picture's true, if Buddhism is true, we don't have to be so worried about saying goodbye to anyone. However, saying goodbye in a really good way… Now you've all heard, I said it last night up there in the hall, we don't want to say goodbye to our loved ones when we're angry with each other. We don't want to have regret if the other person does die before we see them again. To understand, of course, about death - that we're all going to die one day, we never know when. We would like to see each other again, but we don't know, that could be it. So we wish to have a very nice goodbye, understanding that possibility of impermanence coming.
But as far as with this person, when they say, "I really don't like to have to say goodbye" - okay, whether we like it or not, doesn't matter; whether we agree with it or not, doesn't matter; whether we even know about this whole business or not, doesn't matter. We need to have a certain degree of acceptance of life as it is in order to have more peace and happiness with it.