When you first begin your journey, you're not sure just who you are
And the lessons that you're learning, they don't take you very far.
And you just can't keep from stumbling,
Though you try so hard to stand,
And the truth can be so humbling when it's just beyond your hand.

As though youth were my invention, as though love lay undefined,
To stay free was my intention, to stay young and unconfined.
And so I held my pride above you, oh, yes, what a fool was I,
Holding back those words "I love you,"
And letting out that word goodbye.

I was wrong to let you go
I was a child and I did not know
About the love that we both could have given
And now you've gone so far away,
I hope I'll see you again someday
But if I don't, I hope I'll see you in heaven.

I was foolish in my younger days to think they'd never end
Life confused me with its changing ways, and
I could not comprehend
All the meaning in those moments now lost
Like footprints in the sand
And I'm standing here remembering,
But it's so hard to understand.

I was wrong to let you go
I was a child and I did not know
About the love that we both could have given
And now you've gone so far away,
I hope I'll see you again someday
But if I don't, I hope I'll see you in heaven.

Now I'm sitting in this garden in the middle of my days
And my memories drift and harden as the years they slip away,
And I've been looking in this mirror at the age around my eyes
Time is such an earnest laborer, precision is his neighbor.
Lay my body in the ground, but let my spirit touch the sky.

I was wrong to let you go
I was a child and I did not know
About the love that we both could have given
And now you've gone so far away,
I hope I'll see you again someday
But if I don't, I hope I'll see you in heaven.