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ALL PARTINGS are inherently sorrowful, even intentional ones. When people move from a place or a relationship, they leave one of their selves behind. The person who existed in the other setting is not entirely portable and cannot be exactly duplicated; the cost of renewal is loss. Reconstruction will begin in the morning but resources must be marshalled to pull it off.

The brain's creative right hemisphere, where bold ventures are hatched, doesn't fear severance, but the pragmatic, stability-loving left hemisphere always frets at change. The torn self would prefer the clarity of a single view on events but even a fixed opinion that the move is for the better will be lanced at unexpected moments by a rue of sadness for what will be lost, and the mood of dread and resentment that follows an unwelcome separation sometimes will prickle with excitement.

The brain is asymmetrical. For the ordinary tasks of living, its two neural packages maintain an uneasy compatibility, but when confronted with upheaval they take off the gloves. Ambivalence has dominion and bipolar moods hold the mind prisoner. Grief over a hurt is not a single emotion but a confusion; wakes can strike a festive note and farewell celebrations sail on a pool of wistful regret. The contradiction in all strongly felt experience is such that people rise, elated, to the cry of catastrophe and are gloomy and suspicious of good fortune. Trollope wrote, ''Nothing makes a man so cross as success.'' Brides weep at their weddings: tears of happiness, they explain. Maybe so. The gateways in human existence are hung with double doors: go through one, and there is the sigh behind of the other door closing.

Watch the classic life-death struggle in a toddler. The death side of human nature is to resist change: the small person doesn't like strangers, has an aversion to new food, clings tearfully if the consistent care- givers put on their coats to leave, and needs to clutch a familiar toy or blanket to survive a trip to the supermarket. The life side of the same tiny, defenceless person, the questing, growing, nest-leaving part, drives the baby to wriggle off the parent's lap and sturdily walk away.

John Bowlby, a founder of child psychiatry, built his reputation on his insight into the impact of an infant bonding to an adult on the development of a sane, affectionate person. The principle is that safety breeds confidence: infants whose early anxieties of starvation or abandonment are allayed by continuity and constancy can become people who aren't fearful. New situations will not hold the terror that frailer people experience. When early attachment to a care-giver is weak, however, and the person goes through life feeling unnerved and cheated, it will require courage for that person to withstand the assaults of novelty.

Worse still are those blighted souls who never formed an attachment to anything, human or inanimate, and therefore are indifferent to alteration. The loveless travel light and shed relationships and domiciles without a pang.

A human passage is marked by roads not taken. People grope through the enigmas of every turning, sometimes choosing a direction out of instincts they cannot fathom, more often having direction thrust upon them. At the end of the day, the pattern of departures is random and whimsical. The old are tantalized by the lives they didn't live.

In a lifetime, change is more common than stability and consistency. Despite the frequency of farewells, it is always troubling. A restless spirit hurls the sapient species into voids and visions, but a fundamental need in human nature is for simplicity, for the creature comfort of staying within the boundaries of the known and knowable. All displacements therefore are disturbing, even those which improve status.

When health or position or a mate go, people are plunged into a period of obsession over the deprivation. Their thoughts tethered to a stone, they subject themselves and others to repetitious review of the loss. It is a re-enactment of The Fall: they have been pushed out of paradise, or what in retrospect appears to have been a garden. They suffer a form of panic because they have become strangers to themselves; they don't know who they are any more, or what person will emerge from the debris. They yearn to recover homeostasis, to be again the person they were.

The past cannot be revisited; it isn't there. That realization is the crucial part of grieving.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who wrote the 1969 classic, On Death and Dying, identified the stages of mourning: denial and isolation; anger; bargaining; depression; acceptance. The stages do not proceed in the orderly fashion she outlined. Instead, all five may manifest themselves in a single day and in haphazard order. The same jumble occurs in the grieving process that follows such evictions as job loss or a failed relationship. Healing will be quick or slow, depending on the resiliency of the damaged ego and the supports that emerge, but while it goes on, the cracks in the armor of self-esteem will admit great quantities of pain.

A decade is coming to a close; endings are in the air. Perhaps the Nineties will be kinder but, as Arthur Schopenhauer said, ''Every parting gives a foretaste of death.'' It's true.