Still Learning How to Say Goodbye

By Bill Crane

Though I communicate for a living, I find at times it is the simplest of sayings and messages which trouble me most. My brothers, sisters, and I were blessed to attend a private kindergarten in a large, converted former residence. Kinderama Kindergarten had a large play area outdoors, and classes for 3, 4, and 5 year olds. Brother Brian and I were 13 months apart, and sister Tanya followed behind Brian by another 18 months. Our ages put us in separate classes, and on different sides of a wooden fence between the pre-K and K-classes.

One day Brian waved me and my then best friends Bobby Anguish and Billy Hope over to the fence and asked if he could play with us. We told Brian he needed to play with kids on his side of the fence; we then said “Goodbye,” and we would see him after school. My brother would

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talk about this “dis” for years as that moment apparently left a scar, and my first of many challenges with the appropriate time and way to say goodbye.

Our family matriarch, Lynn Crane, has never been a fan of goodbyes. In part because many farewells were not of her choosing. Her parents divorced when she was a young girl, at a time when divorce was rare. She would not spend time with her father again until her early teen years. Her mother remarried, and a half-brother came soon after. Polio was then epidemic, and in pre-Polio vaccine years, then young Lynn Ready contracted the crippling virus at school and brought it home. Her younger brother, then three years old, succumbed to the disease, and her stepfather, emotionally traumatized by that loss, left her mother and the family.

Jerry Crane would later meet, date, and marry still young Lynn Ready in June of 1960, and a family would soon follow. But before Mom was 30, her mother would leave the world all too soon, taken by

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