How many people around the world have wiped a tear during this song, this line, this moment:
We have.

Our family saw Wicked together last Thanksgiving. This year, we saw it again—together, yet separately, different cities, different schedules, the same emotional landing place. At the final chords, Sara’s six-year-old blurted, "It’s over? Is it really over?” He captured something adults often try to hide: the uneasy truth that we don’t know what comes next, but we do know we’ve been changed.

Being changed by friendships, by teachers, by losses, by love is a lot to hold.

Some songs are heard and absorbed. Slipping into your emotional bloodstream and then surfacing: graduations, funerals, weddings, hospital rooms, long car rides, end-of-year ceremonies, or nights before a child heads off to armed services or college.

Before teaching artist rosters, children’s concerts, or the beautiful chaos of parenting, Sara first sang it in a rehearsal space that smelled like wood, rosin, possibility. She didn’t know then how much the song would follow her, how its meaning would shift over time.

For Good is far more than a musical theatre ballad about memory, identity, friendship, rupture, repair, and people who shape us. The impact is emotional and powerfully neurological.

For Good was written by composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz for the 2003 Broadway production of Wicked. Schwartz has said that crafting the finale duet was the most essential musical problem of the entire show, noting that “if we didn’t solve this song, we didn’t have the show.”

Breakthrough came during a conversation with the show’s writer, Winnie Holzman, who remarked that Elphaba and Glinda had “changed each other for good.” Those words became the song’s emotional anchor.

Schwartz later explained that the lyrics were inspired, in part, by a moment with his daughter. When asked what she might say to a

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