They are rarely the way you picture them.
I pictured the endings of the contract years as a moment, as a clear line, as the email that arrived or did not arrive, the door that opened or closed. But the ending was not a moment. The ending was a season. It was the gradual understanding that something was no longer sustainable, the body’s insistence arriving before the mind’s acknowledgement, the accumulating evidence of a cost that exceeded what the work was worth, the slow crossing of a threshold that I could not have pointed to at the time because I was inside it and thresholds only look like thresholds from the outside.
My mother’s ending will not be a moment either.
I am learning this. It is already a process of ending and also of continuing and the two things are simultaneous, are the same season, which is what I did not understand when I was young about what the ending of a life looked like from inside it. From inside it there is still tea and there are still songs and there are still the clear days and the moments of sharp irreverent humour and the hand held at the end of the evening. The ending is not the absence of all of that. The ending is that alongside all of that.
I know about the endings that are really beginnings.
The retirement that felt like loss until it felt like arrival. The children leaving that felt like diminishment until it felt like expansion. The relationship to the body that was adversarial until it became something closer to a late-forged peace. These endings were not losses. They were the releasing of one version of things to make room for the next version, which could not enter until the previous one had finished.
I am trying to hold all of this at once.
The knowledge that endings contain beginnings and that this is not a comfort when the ending is the ending of someone you love, that the beginning-that-follows will be yours and not hers and that the asymmetry of that is its own kind of grief that does not resolve into consolation no matter how much time I spend with it. I hold it anyway. I hold it because she is still here and the holding is not only for the ending, it is also for the now, for the tea and the songs and the hand and the clear days, which are still here, which are the whole of what there is, which I am learning, one day at a time, are enough.
