Nothing Is Ever Finished

''Life begins on the other side of despair.''
                                                               Jean Paul Sartre


  The end of December is an emotionally precarious interval even for the hardwired pragmatists and cynics. It is hardly possible to escape the sombre awareness of  time slipping away, like the brief and fleeting golden hour of  a winter evening.  In the midst of all the yuletide mirth, there is a deep, melancholic shadow of  an impending closure; the long nights, the fog that obscures all clarity, the low, transient sun and the fatigued warmth it radiates rather weakly, the chilly and colourless nature-- all of this heighten the awareness of things coming to an end. Of youth and vitality fading away, of life giving way to death.

   So why is it that we are so paralysingly afraid of endings anyway? One of its most vital clues could be rooted in our infantile separation anxiety: the Mother, the source of security and nourishment, when they physically abandoned us--which every mother, however constant and perfect, must do at one point or another--triggered this profound but unutterable sorrow and helplessness, putting an end to the Edenic bond that is perfect and self-contained.
 In adult life, every time we react to loss and grief, with our indescribable anxiety and despair, we unconsciously dig deep into this primal ache of rupture and separation, our first ever lesson in life: however perfect and pleasing things are now, they must come to an end.

  In adult life of course, endings are more complex, more bewildering than that. And there are myriad reasons they terrify us. It opens up a chasm of absence of the object/ habit/ person that, pretty much like the nourishing mother, gave the identity its contour, guaranteed sustenance to our sense of being.

  A person who has lost his job is depressed because he has forfeited his individuality in a larger network of values where existence is justified by the signifiers of capitalistic ascendancy. His career was that signifier for him, in the absence of which he feels he has been rendered invisible.
  A lover who has broken off with his partner is on sleeping pills because he is ripped apart to stare at the empty days and nights staring back at him, where he is denied the comfort of the routine of a bad relationship--the quarrels, the conflicts, even the sullen silences. These exhausting differences is what gave his identity its justification, the end of which makes him fatally depleted.
   A grieving person is visiting his therapist twice a week because he is groping in the vacuum opened by the death of his loved one; this vacuum is the end of a long habit, of having someone around, which, as it vanishes, releases the nightmarish terror of not knowing what to do with oneself anymore.

Endings are frightening because it is the end of the familiar. What lies on the other side of ending is the wild freedom of choice, its dizzying infinity which is also vertiginous and terrifying in its own way. To have to make a choice, after the end of a familiar experience, is the matter of a tremendous existential anxiety: to choose is to risk going wrong, to fail and be abysmally let down, to grieve, to cry, to break. All over again.

Apart from the gnomic cliche that every ending is a new beginning, if we look closely enough at the phenomenon of endings itself, we would realize that no end is as final as it seems.
There is an exquisitely beautiful indie music video, called 'Cold/mess', where two lovers decide to end their relationship while eating a lemon tart which releases memories of intense passion and pain, images of emotional sadism, self-wounding violence, alternating scenes of distance and intimacy, conflict and surrender, at the climax of which there is that final collapse of trust and respect. But even in the cold aftermath of estrangement, what the lovers individually carry is their secret and abiding love of the lemon tart; the sweet closure that tempers the bitter, acrimonious ending and signifies a continuing togetherness on the other side of the seemingly total physical separation.

It is not hard to find this 'lemon tart' in every ending we would ever experience: it is the deep assurance  of a continuing benevolence and justice at the heart of loss. What makes endings brutal is the lack of this faith.
That is why it is necessary to give a respectful send-off to the laid-off employee, to break off with a lover with one final, honest hug, to raise a toast at the funeral dinner, to drink and dance and kiss at the stroke of midnight as we ring off the dying year.
 These are the formalised, ritualistic gestures of closure that make endings a source of gratitude and inspiration.  This is how endings add dimension to our character, enhance our individuality, deepen our reserves of empathy and experience, which ultimately make us the uniquely engaging characters that we, each one of us, are.

On a collective, public level too, endings of status quo are important for the evolution of the social order. The ancient Greeks understood this concept only too well. The denouement of  every Classical tragedy, every catastrophic bloodbath and ruination is also the bloody nascency of a higher and more stable world order, that incorporates--and never represses or denies-- the wisdom and enlightenment which was imparted on the civilization by events fraught with crisis and calamity.
The burning shores of Troy held forth the promise of the birth of Rome, because the ending that the Trojan war was never really faded or went away.

Christianity elevated this idea to its logical climax and cancelled the idea of death and loss itself--in the realm of the spirit--so that the end of innocence in Eden becomes ''felix culpa'', the fortunate fall, that heralded the coming of Christ, uplifting the destiny of humanity.
Even as Christ's mortal flesh perishes on the cross, unfelicitated and abandoned like a common criminal, his message, his personal mythology, resurrects to change the course of human history--sacred and secular. We had to await the end of his mortal body before a more enduring miracle of his sublime soul could begin, and ultimately a more permanent and rewarding metaphysics that would revolutionize the religion and politics of the ensuing couple of millennia.

Endings are never terminal. It is our fear of them that makes it fatal. Perceived in this reassuring light, every ending makes our soul a little stronger, deeper and more colourful:  the skill we picked up at a particularly unrewarding job-- that we understandably left behind-- can prove to be a life-saving asset in a subsequent, more satisfying career; a lover, who left us long ago, may have had ignited a passion for cooking or pets in us which has stayed and made our lives richer and fulfilling in unexpected ways; the dead and departed too have left us their wisdom and values, their memories and stories that are intensely alive in our own vivid existence, each day, in every new way.

As long as the last of those stories lives, those memories survive, those words are spoken in pubs, bedrooms, on stage or at the dinner table; in fiction, cinema, painting or oral tellings in tribal villages; across generations, communities and countries, things refuse to end.
Whatever ends in the realm of experience branches out into infinitely diverse beginnings--in nostalgia, art and life. As secrets, as stories and as histories.