on endings

some disorganized thoughts about loss & poetry

When I was about five years old, I got my first pet: a goldfish. The task of naming him fell under my jurisdiction, and so I called him Fishy Fish — an apt, if not particularly creative, title that fit nicely into the Adjective-Noun formula I had recently learned in my journey of language acquisition. Poor Fishy Fish lived one glorious week, and then he stopped swimming, and I was to understand that this newfound change in his demeanor was permanent. My mother and I took his little orange carcass to the park and threw him in the pond — a symbolic gesture, laying him to rest in a body of water, so he could, in some sense, return to where he came from. (In reality, he did not come from a pond at all, but from a glass tank at PetSmart, but they probably wouldn’t have taken so kindly to us dumping him back there.) As we drove away, I watched from my booster seat as two geese began to honk and peck at each other, fighting over who would get to eat him. And that was that: the end of Fishy Fish.

I’ve recently realized that I think about death maybe a lot. This may have something to do with the fact that my mom took me to play in graveyards when I was a toddler, and I learned the alphabet by reading the letters on headstones. I am aware that this sounds completely made up, like the trite backstory of some goth character in a poorly written YA novel, but it is absolutely true, for better or for worse. Proof below.

my very macabre early education, circa 2006

I don’t know if I even knew what death was when I was that young. I don’t remember how or when it was explained to me. I asked my mom about it; she said all she ever told me was that someone being dead meant they were “gone to Heaven to be with Holy God,” and that I never really asked for further clarification. I thought about what I might have said in her position — what I might say to a small child if one were to ask me what happens after we die. I think I would say something like: Do you remember what it was like before you were born? And presumably the child would say No. And then I would say: Exactly. I think it’ll be like that.

But I don’t know if a child could really understand that. I certainly didn’t think of things that way. When I was a child, death really scared me. (Duh.) I think I was about eleven or twelve years old when I started to question the idea of heaven, at least the one with clouds and angels and eternal bliss. I vividly remember lying awake one night in my bunk bed, paralyzed with fear, clutching my stuffed animals, wondering what it would mean if there were nothing after death at all. I imagined it to be like when you close your eyes and you’re trying to fall asleep, and everything is dark and quiet except for the thoughts in your head. Only, when you’re dead, you can’t open your eyes; you can hear nothing and see nothing for eternity, but you’re still conscious, trapped inside your head forever, with no way out. Eventually I sat up in bed and started hyperventilating. It’s no wonder this notion gave me a panic attack. I was essentially imagining some sort of weird minimalist hell, akin to the plot of Johnny Got His Gun. Kind of heavy stuff for a seventh grader.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve become less terrified of death and much more rational when thinking about it. But I’ve also realized that my thoughts about death aren’t really about death in its most literal sense, and more about endings in general. I am completely preoccupied with endings. Sometimes I’m so afraid of the pain I will feel when something ends that I can’t fully enjoy it while it’s happening. Sometimes this fear prevents me from even starting something at all. I’ve learned that there’s a term for this: anticipatory grief — “the feeling of grief occurring before an impending loss.”

Unlike my fear of literal death, this sense of anticipatory grief gets more and more acute as I get older. Most of my life was reliably stagnant, with a permanent setting and a cast of characters that rotated very little. But in recent years I’ve had to leave a lot behind, and I’ve had to confront the horrible truth that seems obvious but isn’t, really, not until you experience it firsthand: everything ends eventually. When I think about it too much, the weight of it feels impossible to bear. I’ll be getting dinner with my friends, or watching a movie, or knocking on one of their doors, and all of a sudden the grief will come up from behind and choke me. Someday, sooner than you think, you won’t live close enough to these people to knock on their doors on a whim. Someday this will all be over. Someday this will all just be a snapshot in a photo album. And what are you going to do then?

It’s hard to have fun when you can physically feel the moment crystallizing into a memory around you as it’s happening. I try to dig my heels into the ground and flail my arms around trying to grab onto every minute, but they all just melt away like snowflakes in the heat of my palm. Sometimes I wonder how I’m ever supposed to love anything at all if I will inevitably, and perhaps imminently, lose it. But I still do. I can’t help it. And so I try and get the grief out of the way early, to steel myself for the eventual letting go, in the hopes that the preparation will make it hurt less.

Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it. — David Foster Wallace

It’s May now. The cherry blossoms are giving way into green leaves, the daffodils are shriveling up, and the magnolia blossoms are turning brown and falling to rot on the sidewalk. It’s getting hot, and my sophomore year of college is rapidly drawing to a close. I’m going home in two weeks. That means that, in two weeks, I will be halfway to the end of college. These past two years have been perhaps the happiest, most exciting, most fulfilling of my life. And now there are only two left. How am I supposed to have that knowledge and still behave normally? Is it not supposed to keep me up at night, wide awake in frenzied desperation, trying to cling on to every passing moment? How can I enjoy anything when the enormous, imposing, not-so-far-away END is casting its formidable shadow on all of it?

In my poetry writing class, we recently dedicated a whole week to endings. We discussed the many different ways one might end a poem: with a question, an image, a statement, a conversation, a repeated word or sound. I came to realize that the ending of a poem is perhaps the most important part of it. The note on which a poem concludes sets the tone for how you think of it in its entirety.

Here is one of my favorite poems, with one of my favorite endings. It is very short.

“Poem” by Langston Hughes

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began, —
I loved my friend.

What I think makes this poem’s ending particularly impactful is the fact that it ends the exact same way it begins. (It’s just like how I wanted to bury Fishy Fish in the water to return him to his roots.) The poem is circular; you can read it over and over again in an infinite loop. It’s a representation in words of the process through which people come in and out of your life. You meet somebody; you love them; one way or another, you part ways; and then they become cemented in your past as a person you once cherished. Their memory becomes a monument to the love that was once there, which will never be erased, even after the loss of its object. That love from the past empowers you to continue. It is what stops you from crumbling under the weight of the loss. And so you go through the loop again, and again, and again, until you die.

The beauty of anticipatory grief is that it stems from an affection so all-encompassing and overpowering and ridiculous that it runs out of ways to express itself, so it has to express itself through fear. I like you so much that I can’t imagine anything worse than the loss of you. This brings me some comfort. Even when I have to part with something, I can take solace in the fact that it began and ended with love; it is bookended by it, just like the poem.

Holding onto something so tightly that it can’t breathe won’t make it stay forever. It’ll just squeeze the life out of it while it’s still here. No matter how much I preemptively grieve a loss, it won’t stop it from hurting when it happens. There’s no point in stealing sadness from the future. There’s no way to prepare myself, or prevent it, or make it easier. I just have to live it. Again, and again, and again.

So I guess if a thing has to end, I can only hope that it will end soft as it began. I can’t hope for no goodbyes, so I will hope for gentle ones. Everything will someday fade from reality into memories: I hope they’ll be happy ones.

these will die, and so will I — but aren’t they beautiful?

Sorry, I can’t help myself — one more poem before we go. This is just an excerpt, not the whole thing. It’s my favorite part, and, in fact, it’s the ending.

From “In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Thanks for reading, and Fishy Fish, may you rest in peace — wherever you are.

XOXO, Hannah