Through the gates, past the scaffolding, anticipating at every step my favourite cafe and the pleasure of meeting a friend. No lights though and on the door a pitiful sign expressing regret about its closure. I know in the scheme of things, perhaps especially at this moment of world discord, the closure of a beloved place is a very small thing but it got me wondering. Would I have had a different experience there last time had I known it would be the last time? And what of other experiences?
The very next day Maria Popova described a similar experience in her Marginalian. She goes on to say, with such eloquence:
“We know that entropy drags everything toward dissolution, that life is a vector pointed at loss, but how rarely we realize that the lasts are last, how staggering the turning of those corners. The friend you embrace in a casual parting not knowing it is the final farewell. The lover you kiss not knowing you will never touch again. Your mother answering the phone in a voice you’ve known forever, a voice you don’t know you will never again hear.
Even science has tenderness for these unbidden finalities in its term for the last known survivor of a species: endling …”
The word endling really struck me. What if there was a word to capture these inevitable yet undesired and unanticipated endings? Somehow preparing us on a daily basis not just to “carpe diem” but be aware of what could be taken away, allowing us to deeply appreciate what is, before it is no more. And beyond that, a realisation that there is only life because there is death; there is only change because things have their natural endings. Quoting her again: “Energy, the giver of life. Entropy, the taker away. …. We are only alive because our Sun is burning out. Without entropy, there would be no us.” The word entropy doesn’t do it for me. Perhaps it’s too unfamiliar, too scientific, I want something which suggests emotion, being grabbed by the throat, feeling my stomach falling like an unchained elevator as it gains momentum before crashing to earth.
I like “endling” but the exact right word hasn’t come to me yet. It will, probably around 2:00 am, when the best words often emerge from that creative abyss of the fertile void. (Or as an elderly friend describes so beautifully: a recollection gently emerging from the murky depths of her lifetime of memories, slowly rising to the surface, usually (to her dismay) minutes, hours or even days after she wanted access to them).
When someone dear read this in first draft, they said “so, this is what you think about??” and the answer is yes, this is exactly the type of thing I contemplate….