IT’S BEEN FIFTEEN YEARS SINCE I FIRST heard the word ghosting. My friends had been to a wedding in South Florida. For the uninitiated, South Florida is beautiful, sunny, and full of amazing people, but it is not Southern. At least not Southern in my sense of the word. The guest list was mostly New Yorkers who had realized why birds fly south for the winter.
My friends returned and shared a most amazing discovery.
The party was dwindling down with little fanfare, people just leaving without even a wave. My friends were stunned.
That night, we all learned the art of ghosting. And I had questions.
“They just left the party without saying goodbye?”
My friends confirmed I had grasped the situation correctly.
“Ok.” I asked another question: “But did they say goodbye to the bride and groom?”
“NO!” they declared.
I kept on. “What about the parents that hosted the reception?”
“Nope,” my friends said.
“Ok, but what about—”
“Ellen! They just left. One second they were at the party and the next they were gone, like a ghost.”
For the life of me, I can’t imagine getting away with that in my family. In the South, there is an art to everything, and that includes goodbyes. Our goodbyes can take longer than the hellos. If your goodbye is too short, then you are being rude, but make it too long and you’ve got to start saying goodbye all over again to the people you said goodbye to first.
Leaving early and leaving first are two different things. The number one rule is that you cannot be the first to leave a party unless you have let the hostess know that you’ll be leaving early. If you have a sick family member or family visiting from out of town, then a good hostess appreciates that you’ve made the effort in spite of whatever else is going on and gets you out the door so fast your head will spin.
When it comes to leaving first, my uncle Jimmy is the king. As he gets out of his seat, he declares, “Y’all come go with us.” When you hear him say that, you know that you only have about thirty minutes to start making your exit.
The other rule of the goodbye is that as the host, you can’t just say, “Ok, bye—thanks for coming.” You have to give them the first goodbye, then after they’ve made all their other goodbyes, you have to walk them out the door and make sure they get to the car without turning their ankle. Or in my family’s case in the ’80s, you sit in the car forever while your parents and grandparents go on and on for what feels like an eternity.
These long, drawn-out goodbyes used to feel like torture, but now I know that they were all filled with love. We do everything big in the South, and that includes love. If we’ve invited you over, it’s because we want to see you and see as much of you as we can. We take you all in because we’ve learned as we get older that we may not get many chances to say goodbye.
So yes! Yes, you can ghost your family in heaven, but you’ll be missing out on one of the best parts of being Southern.