Choir Notes

The Good in Good-bye
From Music and the Spoken Word
Delivered by: Lloyd D. Newell • Program 4169

On January 5, 2006, mine foreman Martin Toler and 11 fellow miners, trapped in a West Virginia mine, crouched together hoping to escape poisonous gasses released by an unexplained explosion. In his final minutes, Martin scrawled a note on the back of an insurance form. The message was simple: “Tell all—I [will] see them on the other side. It wasn’t bad. I just went to sleep.” At the bottom of the page he concluded, the words sliding off the edge, “I love you.”1

Even though we didn’t know Martin Toler, his note makes us we wish we had. With his own life in peril, he found a way to comfort his loved ones. That says something about him. Clearly, this 51-year-old miner, who had worked most of his life below ground, prized people and his relationships with them.

Meredith Willson, in a song from his Broadway hit The Music Man, asked the question “Where is the good in good-bye?”² Perhaps Martin Toler answered that question with his parting words: “I love you.” Martin taught us much about how to say good-bye.

When we leave a job or move from a neighborhood, when we walk those final steps at graduation or simply drive off in the morning, our good-byes can reflect more than a passage of time. They can be expressions of love connected to that house, that town, that time, that friend.

Martin Toler’s older brother said of him: “I knew he would have left a note. It was heart-wrenching, but I was glad to get it.”³ Saying good-bye is not easy, but it is good. For us and our loved ones, it can inspire hope in the future, comfort in the present, and gratitude for cherished memories in the past. That is the good in good-bye.

1. In Felicity Barringer and Brenda Goodman, “Coal Miners’ Notes of Goodbye, and Questions on a Blast’s Cause,” New York Times, Jan. 6, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/national/06mine.html.
2. “Sincere,” 1957.

3. In “Coal Miners’ Notes of Goodbye.”