Reading the End First

One of the quirks of my incomparable friend Rexie was that she would go straight to the back of a book she was about to start and read the last pages, just to make sure she could bear to read the book.  We’d try to talk her out of it.  “You’re going to spoil it, Rexie!” we’d say.  But she’d had enough trauma in her life, and wanted to know everything came out ok before she got involved.  Just one of the ways she drove us crazy and why we loved her – she was so stubbornly Rexie.

With my father so close to the end of his life, I am thinking more than ever about beginnings and endings and the stories in between.  I’ve been sorting my mother’s collection of snapshots – pictures my sisters and I have sent her over the years, so she could see how her grandchildren were growing between visits; pictures from her early life, of her parents, her sisters, and a few from her college years.  At the same time, I am inheriting the few artifacts my father saved.  I have a whole table covered with stacks of pictures sorted into Martha, Jeanie, Ruthie, Lois, Mother, other relatives, and Daddy.  I have the beautiful 8x10s of my parents’ wedding, which no one but me is left to treasure.  There they are, with my Grandpa and Grandma – before I was conceived, younger than I ever knew them – in the story that was going on before my story began.

There’s a well-known Graham Greene quote, from The End of the Affair:  "A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead."  I’m looking back from the last chapter of my father’s life to the beginning of mine, and retelling our story to myself, with the end in mind.  Like Rexie, now that I know “it ends good,” I can bear to go back and look at my father closely, without feeling the sick fear I used to feel whenever I thought about him.

And I’m looking ahead from the beginning of my life into the story I was going to live through, and playing with “What if I could have known?”  If I could have somehow sneaked a peek at these last pages when I was living through the first chapters, it would have been unfathomable to me that it could turn out this way.  It was overwhelmingly depressing to be his child.  So much shame and fear.  But if I could have seen how beautifully we would be connected now, how much I could love him here at the end, I might have been less frightened of life in general, and more curious and excited to see how it all played out. 

Now I call him every day right after his lunch.  We have our little ritual.  I always tell him I love him, and he says, “I love you, Ruth.”  Some days he can’t talk much, so I tell him I know he loves me too, so he can just say “Yes.”  I thank the nurses who hold the phone for him for taking good care of him.  Today’s nurse said, “Oh sure, he’s a doll.”  And he is a very sweet man.  But I sure did not know that at the beginning.

Whoever is writing this story I’m in has been throwing me some interesting plot twists.  I’m in awe, and very grateful, and humbled.  How many people get to have this kind of an ending to a relationship that had that kind of a beginning?  It’s teaching me to keep opening my heart, to let the good stuff in.