Knowing How to Say Goodbye in a Long-Lived Society. The Other Side of Living Longer
This weekend I was at the wake of the father of one of my best friends. Not in a funeral home, but in a house. The man was Germán Pesqueira. There, among long silences, hugs, and looks that said everything, I thought that perhaps one of the great pending subjects of long-lived societies is not learning to live longer. It is learning to say goodbye better.
We talk a lot about longevity in biomedical terms: prevention, nutrition, technology, years of life gained. But we experience very little of the more human dimension of all this. Because living more years also means accumulating farewells. It means facing, sooner or later, the moment of letting go of those we love. And preparing ourselves so that, one day, they also let go of us.
During those days, an idea kept circling in my mind that I have not been able to shake for a long time: I always wanted to interview someone who knew they were in their final days. Not from morbidity, but from lucidity. To know what it feels like when time truly narrows. What questions appear. What matters. What, suddenly, stops mattering. A few days earlier I had proposed it to Germán’s family. I knew he was saying goodbye and I wanted to listen to him. But death does not wait. It arrived before we could sit down and talk. And that left me with a certainty: if there is something we want to say, ask, or do, we have to do it now. Not tomorrow. Now.
In recent years, some public figures have helped open this debate from serenity and experience, such as the mountaineer Carlos Soria, who continues climbing mountains past the age of eighty and has explained in various interviews that living with risk has taught him to accept death as a natural part of life and to live with greater awareness of the present. Presenter and podcaster Uri Sabat also addressed this issue after the death of his father, in a conversation with journalist and psychologist Tessa Romero, who lived through a near-death experience after suffering cardiac arrest. They spoke about the meaning of life, pain, love, and that very human idea of “going home” when the body shuts down. Beyond beliefs or scientific explanations, the episode brought something essential to the table: death remains one of the great silences of our culture, even in an age obsessed with extending life.
Because death, although democratic, almost always arrives without warning. And when it comes without having spoken about it beforehand, it leaves families with impossible decisions: treatments, rituals, words that can no longer be spoken. Hence the importance of writing down our final wishes. Not only the medical ones. Also, the vital ones: what we want to be respected, what legacy we leave, what we would like to be remembered for.
Longevity is forcing us to change the way we understand the end. It is not enough to lengthen life: we have to endow it with meaning until the very last moment. In this context, voices such as that of Dr. Vicente Arráez provide a deeply humanistic perspective. After more than forty years accompanying processes of death and fifteen as transplant coordinator at the General University Hospital of Elche, Arráez maintains that death is not an end but a transformation, the moment in which the purest lucidity of life is revealed. From his work at the Metta-Hospice Foundation, dedicated to accompanying terminal patients and their families, he insists on something that is hard to accept: saying goodbye is the final act of love. It does not consist of holding on to the other person. It consists of helping them leave in peace.
Accepting finitude is not pessimism. It is clarity. It forces us to live with fewer postponements, to say earlier what matters, to reconcile, to give thanks. It reminds us that time is not guaranteed and that life, precisely because of that, is a gift that runs out.
Perhaps a truly long-lived society will not be the one that accumulates the most years, but the one that learns how to close cycles well. The one that invests not only in medicine and technology, but also in emotional education for grief, in a culture of accompaniment, in spaces where talking about death no longer feels like admitting defeat.
Because living longer only makes sense if we also learn how to let go.
And perhaps the greatest wisdom lies not in defeating time, but in understanding that every instant we live is already, in some way, a small farewell.
