The End
Finished a book this past weekend, When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. It’s about death and dying and how the author faced it when he discovered as a 36-year old that he had stage IV lung cancer. It’s well written and it got me thinking about the big ending and how life is full of little things that end--ball games, rounds of golf, songs, books, movies, meals, TV shows, relationships, concerts, the day, careers. Basically, life is an endless cycle of endings, and even that cycle will probably one day come to an end.
It’s strange to think of it, but it’s true. They’re everywhere. We begin; we end. The show begins; it ends. I don’t think, as a young person, I ever thought very much about how often things ended or what it meant. Things just ended. The ballgame is over, what time do we play tomorrow. My undergraduate work is finished, when do I start graduate school? A relationship ended, when will the next one start. Some endings were bad, of course, and even made me sad—ball games, movies, relationships, you name it—but there was always tomorrow.
Nowadays, tomorrow no longer seems a given, which puts an entirely different spin to endings. At this point, I’m unsure of what to make of it. Just something to ponder, I guess. I know that I’d like my personal ending to be gracious, whenever it might come, although I hope it’s a long way down the road. In the meantime, however, I’m going to concentrate on beginnings—Spring, children, the downbeat, the first page of a book, hello—and let the endings come as they will, in due time. Because I’ve also learned that tomorrow was never a given. And that thought brings me to the end of this little essay, a tad bit unresolved, perhaps, but the end nonetheless.