End Beautifully

 

All relationships end, either by death or drift.

Sometimes the ending is relatively abrupt and discrete, like an amputation. Marriages and partnerships implode, friends cut ties, or family members become estranged. Close coworkers move onto other opportunities and you lose touch in the bustle of ‘The Busy’. Someone you care about dies.

Over time, we accumulate people who once meant a great deal to us and deeply shaped who we became, yet are no longer part of our lives.

Other relationships don't end so much as they change shape. Romance settles into companionship. Best friends become fond acquaintances. Former partners become chosen family. Even death invites us into a new relationship with the person we've lost.

 

It strikes me that a culture so determined to deny death is also deeply uncomfortable with endings of every kind. We resist not only mortality, but transformation itself.

Endings are painful enough. Our resistance to them usually just creates even more suffering.

So I wonder, what could be possible if we began every relationship with the understanding that it will eventually end?

And with that understanding, what if we began every relationship with a commitment to end beautifully?

 

The phrase ‘end beautifully’ came to me one night as I was falling asleep.

I had recently realized that I was in love with my friend, and was pretty sure he was in love with me, too. This transition from platonic affection to romantic love arrived when I wasn’t ready for it; I’d ended my engagement with a beloved less than a year earlier and was still finding my way back to myself on wobbly legs.

When the voice inside me said so clearly, “End beautifully,” it was followed by a rush of understanding what that meant, and it gave me comfort and courage to allow myself to begin something new, even as I was still braiding meaning into what had ended.

You know the expression, “If you love something, let it go”?

Every time I hear that, I see myself standing with my hand in front of me, palm up, and fingers outstretched, as if my palm were an inviting place for someone else’s heart to rest, like a beautiful, delicate little bird finding a safe place to perch. I see myself feeling awe and wonder at the love that has chosen to be with me.

Then comes the temptation to close my fingers around it, to pull it toward my chest and keep it for myself, to make it so that this gift has to struggle against me if it wants to leave. I can see myself feeling sadness if it chooses to go, and the fear of being sad while wondering if it will stay.

But when I layer in the idea of ‘end beautifully,’ I feel a softening, a deeper willingness, and a courage to keep my palm open, allowing the love that’s there to come or go according to some energy that’s not mine to control.

Because if I can be okay with the reality that this moment of connection is only temporary, even if temporary turns out to be a lifetime, it shifts how I engage with the moment.

I pay more attention. I treasure ordinary moments. I stop assuming there will always be another chance. I try to make it so there’s something worth staying for, or to come back to again and again.

It lets me imagine a future with less regret; a future where I won’t be haunted by the things I forgot to cherish.

When my friend and I had that tender, vulnerable exchange where we shared I love you’s for the first time, the rushing sweetness of the moment was housed in the reality of living 800 miles apart, of both of us being caregivers for family members whose lives don’t have a lot of runway left, of both of us being in the early days of entrepreneurial ventures full of excitement, wonder, and risk.

External forces dare to remind us of the impossibility and impracticality of loving each other. But rather than hunker down and brace against such an intrusive reality—to close our fists around the love that had landed in our palms—I instead asked him for only one commitment as we stepped into what will no doubt be a complicated future: that whatever unfolds between us, we promise to end beautifully.

Maybe our story ends because we both recognize it’s time; we arrive at our ending in mutual awareness and agreement to transform romantic love into something else, and through a blur of tears, we can grieve for what’s ended as we yet again open to something different emerging between us.

Or maybe death comes to claim one of us next week or 50 years from now, and the love-shaped hole that’s left behind can be mourned without the taint of regret, guilt, or shame. We can rest in the stormy comfort of knowing that we loved each other well.

Or maybe one of us wounds the other deeply enough that love can’t continue. Perhaps one of us succumbs to one of our many perfectly human shortcomings, and a unilateral choice is made to end the relationship.

In that case, the possibility of ending beautifully lies in holding compassionate boundaries. It might sound something like, “You hurt me, and I don’t see a path back from that betrayal. I hope we both find healing and forgiveness. I'll tell the truth about what happened, but I won't trash your character in the process; hurt people hurt people. So, goodbye. Thank you for what we did get right."

Ideally, if we are both committed to ending beautifully, the one who did the hurting will take responsibility for their part of it, learn, heal, and do better next time. But life is rarely ideal. Sometimes ending beautifully is something only one person can choose.

 

I’ve painted a picture of romantic love ending beautifully, but the concept applies equally to all relationships, whether they are personal, professional, serious, casual, new, or long-term. Foremost among these is the relationship we have with ourselves.

If you’re willing, put yourself at your moment of death. Imagine scenarios that include a sudden and unexpected ending that comes too soon, and also scenarios where you can see it coming as the conclusion to a long life.

In those final moments, whether they are the timeless seconds that survivors of a near-death experience often report, or they are the slow slide of time through terminal illness, what would need to be different today so that your last words might be, “I am ending beautifully”?

What if you asked yourself that question every day, and used the answer to shape your day-to-day interactions with your parents, your children, your siblings, your partner, your coworkers, your waiter, your bank teller…

If ending beautifully were the goal, we might ask ourselves:

What needs to be protected? What needs to be released? What new needs to be welcomed in?

Perhaps ending beautifully isn't something we do at the end at all. Perhaps it's something we practice in a thousand ordinary moments. It's the apology offered before resentment hardens. The gratitude spoken before it's too late. The goodbye that tells the truth without withholding kindness. The courage to keep our palms open, even when every instinct tells us to close our fists.

Maybe the way we end beautifully is simply by living in a way that leaves as little unfinished as possible. Beautiful endings still leave room for grief, rupture, distance, and loss. They don’t ask us to erase those realities. They ask us to meet them without becoming smaller ourselves.