Andrew and Amanda had clear instructions of how to get themselves off to school without me. Annie and I were off in the early morning Denver traffic with the May sunshine in our eyes. It was her senior year and I sat in the passenger seat as she drove the black Volkswagen Jetta she had bought with babysitting money to the metro park tennis courts. She had hopes of making it to state finals again. If she won this match, it would happen.
Almost 20 years later I can remember the intensity of the match. Every time Annie fought back to nearly bring it even, the other player seemed to nudge slightly ahead. The match ended 6-4 and 6-4.
I watched her shake hands with her opponent and graciously congratulate her for the match well played. I met Annie while she was talking to her coach and we said goodbye and walked silently to the car. My heart was pounding in our silence and I was not sure if I should speak. I quietly opened the car door and sat down. She opened her door, sat down and before she turned on the ignition she looked at me and said, “I just didn’t want it to end. It’s over.” We looked at one another and our eyes said all that words could have said to each other. It was the end of her “sports career.” There would be no tennis team in college. This was it.
The words Annie spoke seared deep into my heart. “I just didn’t want it to end. It’s over.”
I remember the weaning of each child. I loved being a nursing mom. It was so “earth mother radical” after my mother’s bottle-feeding generation. My father photographed me reading, “The Motherly Art of Breastfeeding” as I sat on the couch in our Florida home helping Anna unhinge her tongue from the roof of her mouth. It was a feminine “sumo wrestling” act of love and I embraced it with wonder and passion.
I nursed my other two babies too. Only a few times I annoyingly wondered when I’d ever be able to wear a silk dress to church again. But, honestly, I usually loved and reveled in the miracle of feeding my babies with my own milk. I would ponder how hard the last time to nurse them would be. It would bring tears to my eyes at the thought of the end of this phase. I am immensely grateful that somehow, the last time to nurse each baby, was never completely known. I fear if I had known I would have wallowed in sorrow as a retired captain might feel on his very last voyage. I just never knew which nursing was the last.
I am not fond of endings and I cannot believe that anyone ever is.
The last time in our family home is a heartfelt ending that almost takes my breath thinking about it a decade after the fact. I remember taking the final items out of my parents’ home before we sold it. Everything had been cleared out and all the walls painted off white and only the stacks of photo albums remained on the shelves. My sister wanted them to remain and since I was the out of town child I wanted to see the job completed. I calmly carried each one to the garage and said, “No, they will be safe here until the house is sold.” It was a new way to speak to my older sister. It was the closure I needed to see to the end. Closing the back door after the sale was finally completed remains in my memory. I can hear the closing of the door and feel the door handle I had closed since second grade.
Endings are holy and they ache for years to come.
Endings suck.
I watched The Sunday Morning show on CBS this morning. The queen of documentaries, Sheilah Nevins, was interviewed. She is seventy-eight and looks like she is fifty. She confessed without shame the ungodly amount of Botox in her body. At the end of the segment she said, “It sucks to have this all end. I don’t like it at all. It is not fair that it must all end.”
We were never meant for anything to end. Eden held no ending until animals were killed to cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve’s shame. The passage is seldom talked about with all the drama that occurs in Genesis 3. “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them” (v.21). Endings lead me to feel young and small. I want to stomp my foot and shout: “No more death. No more loss. No more endings.” I feel lonely and alone, small and impotent to stop the onslaught of death itself. I can picture in my mind my parents and Dan’s parents, grandparents and friends who have died way too soon than anyone desired. They are all lying down dressed in clothes they loved. Their faces are serene and their bodies cold.
It is all too much without a covering. I am either going to pretend it is just the way life is and shrug and accept it or I am going to stomp my foot and bury my face in my hands and shout, “No.”
Or I can allow every ending, even of this reflection, to stand naked, awkward and needy for death to clothe me in life and awaken a rage that says “Yes” to all that life gives and hunger for the day no end is ever in sight.
Becky Allender lives on Bainbridge Island with her loving, wild husband of 40 years. A mother and grandmother, she is quite fond of sunshine, yoga, Hawaiian quilting and creating 17th Century reproduction samplers. A community of praying women, loving Jesus, and the art of gratitude fill her life with goodness. She wonders what she got herself into with Red Tent Living! bs
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Becky,
your writing, so profound, meets me once again, deep in my bones. You brought me straight to the intersection of my own losses and endings to the hope and power of life today and to life eternal. Thank you for bringing your voice into my world.
Laurie thank you. It is a brutal road being human at times. And being a mom brings a multitude of endings. May we grasp the goodness we have and may the passion of sorrow and joy be hewn deep in our hearts. May our lives point to the hope of eternity with Jesus.
Oh, Becky! How clearly you see. Thank you for giving such life giving words for such a universal ache. You touched a very deep part of my current state. I can’t tell you how much this means to me right now. Thank you. You have given me a way to approach today with strength.
Dear Ruth, you have had a truck load of endings this season. May we know the hope of heaven more and more as we hold death and resurrection simultaneously.
You evoked so much, Becky, through this piece and invited me to ponder my own “endings” and corresponding emotions. Four years ago today my parents sold my childhood home–42 years it was home. As I read your story, I was invited back into that space that I remember so clearly and miss dearly. Also, on the cusp of graduating Seth, your words about endings in motherhood struck deeply. Thank you for inviting me to enter in and acknowledge and honor my heart’s response.
Dear Susan, yes…you are in the thick of it with your sons! It easier to not feel but in not feeling we miss out from the comfort of the gospel and what will one day be.
My heart pounds simultaneously with an achey groan and a fierce joy – at your words replete with such hope in the midst.
Wow…Robyn…You make me curious with what you are feeling. I miss you. This being human stuff is hard! I long for joy that does not end….
Becky,
Ah, my heart holds much. I came home from Denver with a deeper capacity for joy and grief – for others and myself. As a friend told me, “Robyn , you have lived 2 months in the experiences of the last two weeks. I think my emotions are just catching up with me. It’s a very good thing. Miss you!
I loved this, we are kindred spirits. I am 62 and more and more as my own death gets closer and closer, I am sickened by it when I see it, human beings, animals, bugs, lol, it makes Heaven seem so sweet. Thanks for this.♥
Yes….so much decaying and dying around us. How I long to be living in the new heavens and new earth!
Endings are holy…endings suck.
So much yes. We just came to your neck of the woods and had a wedding at kitsap memorial . My husband had been in that area last for two recovery weeks. Strange isn’t it? Watching my daughter in this beginning, I felt the weight of the both/and in my hands. And, oddly enough, memories of her birth and other seemingly unrelated scenes swirled. She asked me to close the service with a mother’s blessing. That was part of the holy. 💜
Oh my goodness! You were very close to us. How wonderful that she wanted you to end the service with a mother’s blessing. I love that. It is odd how endings are also beginnings too. I like how you named that. Thanks for replying.
Amen. Amen. Amen. This was so beautiful, Becky. I especially love the last paragraph! Beautiful writing, beautiful heart.
Thank you Bethany. Thank you.
Sweet Becky, Your words took me on a journey of my own endings. Some so very hard as the day our first grandchildren – identical twin grandsons were born and were with us only a few short hours. And the grieving days that followed as we sheltered our son and daughter-in-law in their grieving and our own as well. Then I remembered another ending that perhaps oddly brought joy. The home of my childhood was sold on auction and a few days later was leveled to the ground, demolished and trucked away to be destroyed. As I revisited, not knowing of this demise, we crested the hill and there in front of me was a grassy green, peaceful area with no reminder of what had once been. The tears of relief flowed as I saw the house was no more and it was replaced with peace. Thank you for inviting me to memories that leave me full of hope and peace.
Valerie, oh you are a dear one. I can hardly imagine the demolishing of a family home and rejoicing that it is no more. And I can not imagine the heartache of saying goodbye to your grand twins! Your first ushering into grandsons and saying goodbye so quickly. Plus,being there for your son and daughter-in-law. Oh, Valerie….your life has been full of joy and sorrow. Hugs to you across the many miles. Yes…remembering, embracing, feeling…..it is what we are called to do when we have gospel hope.
“Or I can allow every ending, even of this reflection, to stand naked, awkward and needy for death to clothe me in life and awaken a rage that says “Yes” to all that life gives and hunger for the day no end is ever in sight.”
Becky, this resonates deeply within my soul. So many endings in my life have brought with them profound loss and cruelty that death itself has felt to be a welcome friend. Indeed, dissociation in its various forms provides the illusion of the comfort of death even while still living. But my heart of hearts cries out for life – Oh, God! If I must be alive, please let me live – really live! Let me be alive and engaged and growing goodness and disrupting evil and bringing a breath of heaven to my world and my heart and holding the realities of the both/and and the now/not yet in this land of struggle! So that when death truly comes for me, I will meet her with a smile and know that I have a life well-lived to lay down and that I have not surrendered it prematurely.
Thank you Jeanette, so much we hold in our bodies when endings and death hits us hard. I loved what you wrote; ” But my heart of hearts cries out for life – Oh, God! If I must be alive, please let me live – really live! Let me be alive and engaged and growing goodness and disrupting evil and bringing a breath of heaven to my world and my heart and holding the realities of the both/and and the now/not yet in this land of struggle!” So true. You are ahead of me with thoughts of meeting death with a smile. It is hard to imagine that day…yet I think you have prompted me to ponder my death in a good way in order to propel me to live more fully. To finally lie down and say, “Okay Jesus…I am ready for your angels to escort me home…my real home!!!”