What to write in a goodbye card (besides good luck)

Every goodbye card has "good luck" in it somewhere, usually four times, in four different pens. Good luck is fine. It is also the least interesting thing you could say to somebody you are going to miss.

Here is how to write the other line.

Say what you will miss, not what they will find

"Enjoy Lisbon" is about Lisbon. "I will miss your terrible parking outside my house" is about them. A goodbye card is the last chance to say the second kind of thing without it being strange, so take it.

Five questions that find the line

Pick one. Answer it in a sentence.

• When did you first notice you liked them?
• What will be quieter, or worse, once they have gone?
• What did they teach you, on purpose or not?
• What is the story you will still be telling about them in five years?
• What would you ask them to do, if they were staying?

Examples to change

Borrow the shape, not the words.

Nobody else will ever text me 'outside' and mean it. Come back often.

You were the first person here who learned how I take my tea. The street is going to be very badly run without you.

I still have the map you drew me on my first day. I am keeping it. You can't have it back.

Thank you for every lift, every loan of the ladder, and the time you pretended not to see me fall in the pond.

Five years of Thursday quiz. We never won once and I would not change a thing.

Keep in touch, but mean it

"Keep in touch" is what people write when they do not expect to. If you mean it, make it specific: a date, a visit, a thing you will send. "I'm coming out in March, save me the sofa" is a promise. "Keep in touch" is a shrug.

What to skip

• Jokes about them being replaced. They are nervous enough.
• Anything that needs the inside story to not sound mean.
• The long paragraph. If it does not fit on the card it is a letter. Letters are lovely. Send it separately.

When the whole group is signing

For a class, a street, a choir or a five-a-side team, a goodbye card online goes round as one link. Everybody writes a line in their own words and it opens on the day they go.

Leaving a job rather than a town? The work version lives at tbf work.