Sat, Feb 17th – Preparing to say good-bye

One of the saddest parts of ship life is saying goodbye to your friends. When you live in an oversized, floating tin can that contains your bedroom, your kitchen, your recreation, the only local nightlife, your library, all the shops you need, your coffee hangout, and of course your WORK, it’s easy to make very close friends with other people very fast. You see these people hanging out while you work, working where you hang out, dining where you dine, going to watch the same entertainment you go to see, and walking home to a door that’s literally only ten feet away from yours.

But just as my contract is for a prescribed amount of time, so is theirs. All of us are here to enjoy our time to the fullest extent, but that makes endings seem so jarring and almost unexpected. Time on a ship is one of the most inexplicable things I’ve ever encountered. One day can feel like a week, a week-long cruise goes by too fast, days of the week are named in terms of locations where we’ll be ported, but at the end of six months, it almost feels like you just pick up right where you left off the last time you were on land.

For whatever reason, this weekend is a popular contract-end date. So is my sign-off date, March 11, and the week after that, March 18th. I would venture to say about 65% of the crew will turn over between now and then, in the next four weeks. The ship’s itinerary is about to cross the ocean in a few months, so that the turnaround port will be Rome instead of Tampa, so I suppose it’s cheaper for the company to fly people out of the US than Italy, and that’s why so many of us are slotted to leave now.

So, many of us are preparing to say ‘goodbye.’ This is never a fun task for me; in fact, I’m quite terrible at it, and avoid it as much as possible. I’d rather let someone go with “catch ya ‘round” like I normally do, expecting I’ll see them in a few hours at the dining room or in the gym working out. But if I don’t happen to see them again before they leave the ship for good the next morning, I’ve been spared the agony of trying to say, “Goodbye,” as if it might be the last time I’ll ever see them.

Such is the case with more than a few of my good friends this weekend. Now, granted, I call them “good friends” because we’ve spent such intensely close time together in the past few weeks… months… we’ve shared community gossip, work woes, personal trials, and adventures in strange countries. But the truth is that I really might not ever see some of these people again. They are from Europe, Africa, Australia, and Asia. Even if we both return to ships for our next contract, the chances that we’ll end up on the same ship again are slim. And the chances of one of us visiting the other person’s country EXCEPT on a ship are even slimmer.

I don’t like saying ‘goodbye,’ so I don’t. Tonight, I will make a point of avoiding all the popular places like the laundry room, the crew human resources office, and the nightly hotspot, the OB, anywhere there might be a ‘last-chance’ party going on. And in the morning, my mind will prevent me from recalling that I won’t be passing by them anymore until that wretched moment when I pass by their replacement who came onboard the same day they left and realize it. Only then will I allow myself to mourn the disappearance of my friend.

Some of these “close friends” will be good about keeping up with emails and if I’m lucky, a phone call here or there. Most of them will simply close the door and move on. But the heartstrings remain intact, regardless of how thinly they are pulled.

The great thing about ship life is meeting and getting to know so well, so many world-class people from every corner of the globe. The hardest thing about ship life is letting them go.