The Irish Goodbye
On leaving without words, returning without permission, and everything that happens in the silence between
I.
There is a moment — you’ll know if and when you’ve felt it — when a room becomes too much.
It’s not loud, and it’s not necessarily unpleasant.
The room is just… full. It’s full in a way that presses against something inside you without a name.
The conversation you were holding starts to feel borrowed. The faces you were reading become text you’ve already finished. And somewhere beneath your ribs, a quiet engine turns over, and the only thought it produces is: go.
Most people, when this engine starts, know how to idle it.
They find the host. They make the rounds. They execute the small, civilized theater (sorry, I couldn’t think of a better word) of farewell — the gratitude, the promises to do this again, the perfunctory hugs that say “I was here and now I’m leaving, and we both agree this is how it’s done.”
I never learned to participate in that society theater. And I’m the worst damn actor.
Instead, I… leave (the room).
Not with cruelty. Not even with intention, most of the time. I… stop being where I was.
One moment, I’m pulling out upteen mints and packets of gum from my jacket pocket.
(Side thought: I’ll channel my Grandma Joyce here and exercise that good ol’ Western Maryland charm. Some of us filterless folks have developed an ungodly, savant-like talent for correctly naming the most atrocious-smelling of the halitosis strands when circling among the networking circuit’s most offensive close-talkers.)
Then the next moment… I’m in my vehicle, and the only sound is the engine. I’m wondering if anyone noticed that I dipped out. What happened? Why did he leave? That’s weird. I don’t get it.
This is called the Irish Goodbye.
And I have done it my whole life.
II.
The Irish Goodbye — also called the French Exit, the Dutch Leave, or simply ghosting with your feet — is the act of departing a social situation without announcement. (And sometimes that’s a good thing, depending on whose company you’re keeping.)
No farewell.
No wind-down.
No “well, I should probably…” trailing into thirty more minutes of not actually leaving. Please don’t do that to me.
Just: presence, then absence.
A magic trick no one asked for.
The term itself is probably unfair to the Irish, who have their own complex feelings about departure and likely didn’t ask to be the mascot of social avoidance. Then you mix in growing up Catholic, plus the Catholic guilt, and the stoicism.
And Dr. Melfi thought Tony Soprano was tough…
But the practice is ancient; it’s universal. It predates the name we’ve given it by centuries, because humans have always struggled with endings.
And some of us learned early that the cleanest cut is the one you don’t have to watch yourself make.
Here is what I want you to understand about the Irish Goodbye: it is not about disrespect. It is not about carelessness. It is not even, really, about the leaving.
It is about not knowing how to stay.
It is the escape hatch of people who feel too much and have learned, somewhere along the way, that feeling too much in front of others is dangerous.
So we leave before the feeling becomes visible.
We disappear before we have to name what we’re carrying.
We choose absence over the vulnerability of a witnessed goodbye.
And here is what I didn’t understand for forty years:
Absence is not neutral.
Absence tells a story, and when you’re not there to say to it, someone else writes the ending for you, I suppose.
III.
The date: November 29, the Saturday after Thanksgiving this year.
Listen, I’m going to level with you all: I bought all this hunting gear just a few days before, at a Tractor Supply in Poolsville. I’m not much of a hunter, but I wanted to spend time in a quiet, sacred place with my Dad, who’s turning 60 on December 12.
We spent the night before (and the night after) in the Green Ridge Mountains in Allegany County (Maryland) — my daddy and grandaddy started taking me “up to the hunting cabin,” the Green Ridge Sportman’s Club, of which my great-grandfather, George Scott Miner, was a founding member, thank you very much, since I was about five years old.
A few miles away from the Green Ridge Sportman’s Club is where my grandfather, Robert Scott Miner, took his last breath on November 28, 2009, almost 16 years to the date.
My father and I were hunting on the first day of Maryland deer season that morning — or more accurately, Dad and I were waiting in the way that mainly hunting is.
We sat.
We watched.
Time moved past us without trying to catch it.
My late grandfather, Scotty Miner, my father’s father, was a career Air Force man who retired as a Chief, understood waiting. Pappy can hold still for hours, and when he would speak, it’s because the words have been weighed, measured, and found necessary. He was a decent, calm, honorable man.
That morning, with our hand warmers nestled inside our hunting gloves, Dad and I held a whispered conversation in the mountains about everything and then some.
So when Dad said something to me that morning, I knew I needed to listen closely.
“You know you do that thing,” Dad said, maybe as a statement, maybe as a question.
(I’m supposed to know what that “thing” is)
“The disappearing. You’re somewhere, and then you’re not. No one knows you left. They notice you’re gone.” (I’m paraphrasing my Dad’s words shared with me.)
Dad wasn’t angry, nor was he passing judgment. He was observing. It was just: here is a thing that you do – and it’s true, and you acknowledge it. And that’s that.
You’re somewhere, and then you’re not. They notice you’re gone.
I kind of laughed. I made a joke about efficiency, about hating long goodbyes, about sparing everyone the awkwardness. I think I made excuses.
Dad didn’t push back; that’s not his way. He just let the observation sit there. And then we went back to waiting.
But I carried Dad’s sentence out of the mountains.
I’ve heard echoes of this, now a noticeable habit — from my family, from professional colleagues, from close friends, from people who looked for me at the end of things and found only the shape of where I just was.
They notice you’re gone.
IV.
I’ve been thinking about what we’re really avoiding when we leave without words.
It’s not just the people.
I’ve Irish-Goodbye’d rooms full of people I love.
It’s not boredom.
I’ve vanished from conversations I was genuinely enjoying.
It’s not even the time.
I’ve left events early, and I’ve left them late, and the leaving felt the same either way.
What I’m avoiding, I think, is the threshold.
Goodbye is a small word, but it asks something enormous. It asks you to stand in the doorway — literally, often — and acknowledge that something is ending.
The evening. The conversation. The particular configuration of people and light and laughter that will never exist in precisely this way again.
Goodbye asks you to be present for the transition. And transitions are where we’re most exposed.
You have to look someone in the eyes and let them see you going. You have to hold the connection and release it simultaneously. You have to feel the weight of what you’re leaving while you’re still close enough to feel it.
That’s the thing I couldn’t do. Maybe I still can’t do it.
Because if I stood in the doorway — if I let myself feel the leaving — then I’d have to admit that the staying mattered. That the people mattered. That I wasn’t just passing through but was actually, vulnerably, there.
But of course they mattered. They still matter.
The Irish Goodbye is sometimes a way of pretending you were never fully present.
And the cost of that pretending is that no one —including you — knows what was real.
That’s hard to do.
V.
We, as in, all of us, live now in an architecture of infinite Irish Goodbyes.
Every text left unanswered is a room we walked out of without turning around. Every email we “meant to respond to” is a conversation we ended by refusing to continue it.
We have built entire communication systems around the premise that presence is optional — that you can be there and not there simultaneously, that you can leave without leaving, that silence is a legitimate response to anything.
I’ve done it; I’ve let silence say things I couldn’t find words for.
Are we going for strength? Maybe silence is self-preservation. But the silence can hurt.
I’ve admittedly let days become weeks, and then months, and I’ve told myself that the passage of time was itself a message, that the other person would understand, that not responding was somehow kinder than responding poorly.
But silence isn’t kind. Silence isn’t even neutral.
Silence is a story someone else has to write. And it’s always seemingly written worse than the truth.
They might write: He didn’t care enough to respond.
Or they could write: I must have done something wrong.
And they could write this: The door is closed now, even if no one shut it.
The Irish Goodbye scales. That’s the danger.
What begins as slipping out of a professional networking event becomes a way of moving through relationships, through jobs, through every connection that starts to feel like too much.
What are we really avoiding? That’s the subtextual question? What uncomfortable feeling are we so desperately trying to avoid?
We can leave a room without words. We can tell ourselves it’s cleaner that way. And we don’t look back to see what we’ve left behind.
Many times over, the people behind us are still standing there.
Still wondering.
Still holding a conversation that ended mid-sentence.
Just wondering what the hell happened, why it happened.
And are you coming back?
VI.
Here’s what the Irish Goodbye actually costs:
It costs certainty.
Not yours — you know where you went.
But theirs.
The people you left are now holding an incomplete story, and incomplete stories don’t always resolve themselves; they keep asking questions that no one’s there to answer.
It costs trust.
Because even if you come back — even if you show up again, as if you never really left — some part of you is waiting now, watching the door, wondering if this is the moment they’ll vanish again. And then you try to figure out that pain, how to navigate it again, even. It gets harder each time.
It costs the thing that mattered.
Whatever you were avoiding by leaving — the vulnerability, the awkwardness, the admission that you cared — that person, that thing, was the whole point.
You know why it hurts? Because it’s real.
It’s supposed to make you feel.
That was the part worth staying for.
And it costs you something too, even if you don’t notice it at the time.
It costs you the knowledge of how to stay, so that you can stand in the challenging moments and not disappear. That’s when things feel like too much; you have options beyond absence.
One of the harder lessons of turning 40 — maybe it’s just inconvenient wisdom — is that you learn to predict specific human patterns with a particular accuracy.
Why is that? Because you’ve experienced the heartache that is absence.
You’ve experienced the silence, the hole, the lack of presence, and all that comes with that.
VII.
I need to tell you about a television show (you may already have watched, though stick with me).
(This section may feel like a slight detour; this is my ADD talking. Only the best part of me.)
Friends had been telling me I would love this show, The Pitt—the HBO medical drama that’s set inside the City of Pittsburgh.
I lived in Pittsburgh. I miss the city. I did my undergrad at Duquesne. It’s hard to believe that it’s been 17 years since I graduated from college.
So I began watching The Pitt.
And here’s the thing about this show: it doesn’t do what medical dramas usually do. It doesn’t wrap everything in a bow. It doesn’t manufacture hope where hope doesn’t belong.
The show is raw. It’s hard to watch. It tugs at your heart. The show depicts human beings meeting and merging at their absolute best, at their absolute worst. It’s not a reality that television always depicts with authenticity.
The Pitt centers around a group of emergency department doctors inside an overcrowded Pittsburgh hospital.
It shows you the brilliant, damaged, deeply human doctors and medical students at work in their domain — the way life’s most intimate moments unfold in fluorescent lighting, surrounded by strangers, without any of the grace we imagine we’ll have when it’s our turn.
Incidentally, I’m an INFJ — one of those people who feel things at frequencies that aren’t always useful in daily life. We have to feel everything; it’s just who we are.
Authenticity can hit me like a physical force. When something is real, I can’t look away. The Pitt is guttural, visceral; it forces you to feel something.
I was watching Season 1, Episode 4.
The date: Just two months ago, on October 7. The date doesn’t make sense to anybody else, but it makes sense to me.
In this episode, there’s a scene where a family is losing their father. They don’t know what to say. They’re standing around his bed, drowning in everything they never told him, and there’s no time left to figure it out.
A doctor — Noah Wyle’s character — offers them something.
Four phrases: Simple; Ancient; Enough.
I love you.
Thank you.
I forgive you.
Please forgive me.
It’s called Ho’oponopono — a Hawaiian practice of reconciliation; it’s a way to close what needs to be closed — a way to say everything that matters before the door shuts forever.
I sat there on my living-room couch, laptop propped open on my lap, doing twenty things, now forty years old, watching fictional siblings say goodbye to a fictional father, and I felt something crack open in my chest.
I love you.
Thank you.
I forgive you.
Please forgive me.
VIII.
I’ve thought about that scene from The Pitt frequently as of late.
The way the universe sometimes puts exactly the right message in front of you at precisely the right moment, and whether you receive it, is entirely up to you. I can’t explain what “that” is.
I love you — this is the hardest one.
“I love you”, I believe, what we Irish Goodbyes specifically avoid.
Because saying it means admitting the staying mattered, the person mattered, the leaving is going to cost something, maybe for both of you.
Thank you — for what was built, for what we built together.
For what was shared. For the good parts, even if they’re over.
I forgive you — for the silences.
Of course, I forgive you for the distance, for the things that weren’t said when they should have been said.
Please forgive me — for my own silence.
Please forgive me for my own disappearances, for every Irish Goodbye I ever made without realizing what it cost the person standing in the room I’d just left.
That’s the framework, as close as we can get to creating one.
That’s what I am trying to say every time I fumble a goodbye, every time I vanish instead of staying, every time I let months pass without reaching out because I didn’t commit to understanding how to bridge the silence that I’m responsible for.
Four sentences.
Simple enough to memorize.
Sometimes the hardest to say.
But maybe we can try.
Maybe we have to figure out a way not to say goodbye sometimes. We have to figure out how to work through the silence.
Why do we sometimes force grief onto ourselves when the people we love are often standing right in front of us?
If you figure that one out, I’d like to know the answer.
VX.
So here is what I am learning — slowly, imperfectly, even when some might say it’s too late to change:
Staying is a skill.
It doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Some of us have to practice it like a language we never learned.
You stand in the doorway.
You feel the discomfort.
You don’t leave.
And if you do this enough times, eventually the doorway stops feeling like a threat.
Goodbye is not the enemy.
The ending is just part of this messy thing we called life.
You don’t get the full experience of being somewhere if you refuse to leave it properly.
You don’t get to say the connection mattered if you won’t acknowledge when it’s transitioning into something else.
Coming back is more complicated than leaving. If it weren’t complicated, you wouldn’t feel it
When you’ve Irish-Goodbye’d someone as I have done — when you’ve let silence stretch into something that feels like it could become permanent — finding your way back is sometimes a text that says, “Do you remember me?”
And when that text finally comes, it’s nearly paralyzing — because as much as you want to say hello again, you might be thinking if you have to protect yourself from the next chapter.
We’re still searching for a theory of Quantum Gravity. This would be the formula that bridges the gap between the giant physics of Einstein and the tiny physics of atoms.
We do not understand the bedrock mechanism of gravity, and we do not have a formula that works everywhere in the universe.
Quantum physics explains the tiny: particles, probability, the behavior of atoms. They don’t talk to each other. There’s no formula that works at both scales. It’s the great unsolved problem.
But I have a theory.
A simple text that says, “Hey, do you remember me?” takes such incredible bravery, such vulnerability.
A text message, like that, reveals that you know what you’ve missed, and maybe you want whoever that is, whatever it is, to rejoin your life.
And I’ve learned that when people reach out as we get older, honor that bravery and open your heart. Try again for the sake of knowing that the feeling of silence, that pain, might hurt less than a future goodbye.
I’m here now.
I was gone.
I came back.
That’s the whole speech. That’s enough, if you mean it.
Maybe this is the theory of Quantum Mechanics.
Some doors don’t close.
This is the one that gets me. I’ve walked out of rooms without a word, certain that the door would lock behind me. That the silence would solidify into something final. That my absence would eventually become an answer no one needed to revisit.
But some doors don’t close. Some people leave them open. Some people wait.
Long past the point where you had any right to expect them to.
X.
I don’t know if I’ll ever entirely stop doing the Irish Goodbye.
The pattern is old. The grooves are deep. I still feel that engine turn over sometimes — the one that says go, the one that promises relief on the other side of absence.
But I’m learning to hear it now.
To notice when it starts. To recognize it as a signal not that I need to leave, but that I’m feeling something I don’t want to feel, and leaving is just the oldest way I know to avoid it.
And I’m learning that the people who stay — who remain in that quieter place you hold without words — deserve more than disappearance.
I think they deserve the full thing. The showing up. The being present. Standing in the doorway when it’s time to go and saying something true, even if it’s small.
I love you.
Thank you.
I forgive you.
Please forgive me.
Or even just: I’m still here. I know I left. I came back.
XI.
My father never mentioned the Irish Goodbye again after that morning in the woods. He didn’t need to. He’d said the true thing once, and then he’d let me carry it.
That’s what truth does. It doesn’t demand an immediate response. It doesn’t require you to agree with it, act on it, or even acknowledge it out loud. It just sits there, patient, waiting for you to be ready.
I’m forty now. I’ve been carrying that sentence for a decade.
You’re somewhere, and then you’re not. They just notice you’re gone.
Maybe, finally, I’m ready to put it down.
Perhaps I’m learning that being somewhere means being there for the whole thing — including the part where you leave.
Maybe I’m learning that the people who matter don’t need a perfect goodbye. They need to know you were there, that you felt it. That the leaving was hard because the staying was real.
And maybe — just maybe — I’m learning that when you’ve been gone too long, when you’ve let the silence say things you never meant it to say, the bravest thing isn’t to explain yourself.
The bravest thing is to come back.
To stand in the doorway.
To stay.
To finally say the four things that matter:
I love you – in whatever way I can, even.
Thank you.
I forgive you.
Please forgive me.
And then — only then — to let the door close gently, because you were there to close it yourself.
Maybe the universe holds together not because of some elegant, undiscovered equation, but because people keep finding the bravery to say:
“Do you remember me?”
Ryan Miner is a co- founder of The Senior Soup and spent five formative years in Pittsburgh, where he learned many things — except, apparently, how to say goodbye.
He’s working on it.
Ryan Miner, MBA | Co-Founder and Podcast Host | The Senior Soup
Hi, I'm Ryan!
I co-founded The Senior Soup Soup with Raquel Micit in September 2022. Together, we host The Senior Soup Podcast.
I am a community relations manager for Ennoble Care in Maryland, where I am responsible for marketing our home-based primary care healthcare practice.
I have over 15 years experience in healthcare, senior services, senior care, marketing, public policy, and search engine optimization.
I have a MBA from Mount St. Mary's University and a BA from Duquesne University.