Endings

At four in the morning, on a laptop in a dark room, somebody else’s child was dying.

Not a real child, of course. Best Interests, the BBC drama with Sharon Horgan and Michael Sheen, about a family confronting the approaching death of their younger daughter.

It is almost unbearably sad. But what makes it powerful is that nobody owns the suffering.

The mother wants her daughter to live. The father loves her just as fiercely and begins to understand something different. The doctors have responsibilities that sometimes require them to say what families cannot bear to hear. The older sister is grieving too, while also being angry, jealous, frightened and alive.

Everybody is separate, but everybody is also connected.

That may be one of the hardest things about loving other people. They remain other people.

We cannot feel exactly what they feel. We cannot protect them from everything. We cannot make their choices for them. We cannot keep them simply because their continued existence matters desperately to us.

And yet their lives enter ours.

Their pain hurts us. Their happiness changes us and then things end.

People die. Children grow up. Parents grow old. Relationships change or disappear. Homes are left behind. Jobs finish. Friendships drift. Bodies become different bodies. Countries change. Entire versions of ourselves vanish while we are busy doing something else.

None of this is particularly original and that may be why we spend so much energy refusing to believe it.

We keep doors open, replay conversations, imagine alternative endings. We return to places, preserve possibilities long after they have stopped being possibilities. There is always the temptation to believe that enough effort, explanation, love or intelligence might prevent the thing from becoming final.

Sometimes it cannot.

Grief seems to begin somewhere around that recognition.

It has no timetable and does not always announce what it is grieving. A person, certainly. But also a childhood, a marriage, a future that once seemed possible. The person we were before something happened.

Sometimes grief is an idea.

Sometimes it is entirely physical.

The chest tightens. The stomach turns. Tears arrive. The body understands something before the mind has found words for it.

In the midst of life we are in death.

It sounds grim until the other half becomes visible.

In the midst of death we are also in life.

Because endings create space. Nothing new can fully begin while everything old is being kept artificially alive.

Something can have been wonderful and still be finished. Someone can be loved and still be gone.

A relationship can matter enormously without lasting forever.

A period of life can become more precious, not less, because it cannot be repeated.

Perhaps this is why stories about other people’s grief can release something in us.

For an hour we stop being the centre of the world.

We enter somebody else’s kitchen, hospital room, marriage, argument, terror. We cry for people who do not exist and discover that the tears are nevertheless real.

Their imaginary pain touches something shared, because all of us are travelling towards endings.

All of us are trying to hold on and all of us will eventually have to let go.

And still people make coffee, someone sends a photograph, a song starts, a football season begins.

Somebody falls in love.

Somebody else says goodbye.

We are not saved from loss by being connected to one another.

Connection is precisely what makes loss possible, but perhaps it is also what makes the whole thing bearable.

We live separately.

We lose separately.

And somehow we share it.

Life goes on.

Another dreadful cliché.

But also completely true.