Standing in Tucson

I cannot find my journal so I will tell you instead, dear internet.

Watching “Stranger than Fiction” just now for the dozenth time, it sank in: when the professor says, about the book that is Harold’s life, “it’s a masterpiece… and it only works if you die at the end.” —that applies to every life. That every life is what you make of it, masterpiece or not, and every life ends in death.

Trite, to be sure. But this time, watching the movie, watching Harold sink into acceptance of death as the unavoidable and unarguable end, it struck me. That, too, could be all lives. Full and vivid for as long as we can make them, and then letting go into the calm of The End.

My life has been full already of shocking and violent deaths. Death has been what happens when things have gone wrong, has been the ripping ending where you don’t get to say good-bye. Death has been trauma and fear and terrible grief.

And it is those things, sometimes. Often, even. But watching the acceptance come into Harold’s face, I felt in my body what my mind has understood and my ears have heard so often repeated: death is part of life, part of every life. Not something we anticipate gladly, but perhaps not a thing of terror, either. Maybe the certainty of death can bring calm, too, as it reminds us to do our best now.

Maybe, if I’m brave, my acquaintance with mortality can keep me in my life brightly, the best it can be, going confidently forward at peace with what’s on every book’s last page:

The End