Alistair Begg Shares Memories of How "Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow"

Dear Friend, August 3, 1983, was a day I will never forget. Forty-three years on, it remains etched indelibly in my memory. The previous evening had been spent with family and friends at my father’s home just outside Glasgow. I recall the laughter, the stories, and the sense of wishing to make the evening last, because when we said goodnight, we knew that the dawn would mean a parting, and “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” The following morning, Susan, I, and our three wee ones (ages four, two, and ten months) walked across the tarmac and boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines 747, which would take us to Boston to connect with a flight to Cleveland. In writing about this now, I realize, to my shame, how little thought I gave to another parting eight years before, when, newly married, Susan and I sailed out of New York for London, leaving her family behind. She was only twenty! I don’t remember ever asking her just what that parting meant for her, her mum, and dad but simply swept her off to a new world and a new life! It surely didn’t help her father, as he filmed our departure, to see the hammer and sickle flying above the Russian ship that would be our passage to London. Before you en...