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Who would you run to if you knew the end was near?
As a human, I was always morbid, and in my second life my favorite hobby is to ride the memories of the souls around me to travel back in time to the great catastrophes of human history and watch the last moments of the victims play out in front of me. It is bizarre of me, but I find solace in these moments. So when I leave Cooper’s mansion, legacy on my mind, I go Endwatching. Many of us do it up here. It is so illuminating, so touching, so revealing, to see where people run, because where they run says everything about the lives they lived. There is no hiding the love that gushes forward, there is no concealing the bones of empathy and generosity that are suddenly exposed, at the end of someone’s time on Earth. Humans can lock themselves in their brains and lose themselves in the mundane details of everyday life all they want, but when they realize the end has come, they will run to what their heart truly wants, whatever or whoever that happens to be. There is no lying to yourself at the end, when the curtain drops. This is your End Love.
No matter the millennium, it always happens the same way. Humans don’t change in the moments when it matters. Word gets out that the big event has happened, which can be anything from a coming mudslide to an erupting volcano, and the surrounding humans slowly realize they will not be able to escape. So instead of running to safety, they run to love. I have seen Italian mothers sweep across city streets under thickening clouds of ash to throw their hands over their children one last time as the walls of lava hit the edge of town, I have seen medieval villages become overtaken by bloodthirsty invaders while an old man hobbles down the stairs to give his laundry-hanging wife one last hug before the swords start dropping. I have seen little children run for their sisters and brothers while tsunamis rush over the Japanese countryside like rugs unfurling over patchwork fields, I have seen teenaged boys in love who had denied their relationship publicly for years suddenly run to each other and openly embrace in the streets as apocalyptic tremors shook the Earth under them and made the mountainsides collapse into the valleys like pudding, burying love. The history of humans is full of death and disaster, but crystallized within that disaster is the purest, most distilled love anyone could ever find in any universe. The skeletons of a husband and wife clinging together in the preserved wreckage of an Ecuadorian mudslide: this is End Love. Two statues made from imprints in the ashes of Pompeii, mother and child huddled in the corner, forever united: this is End Love. This is love, preserved. Forever.
And I have a message for you, the reader. The person you just pictured yourself huddling with in the corner while the heavens fell to Earth and the lights go out above you: that is your person. That is your End Love. That is whom you should run to while you still can. Trust me – I’ve been there. I would know. But don’t wait until the end, like all the poor souls I watch from up here. Do it now.
Cooper is so consumed with his own death, he’s never stopped to think about anyone else’s. But on a balmy night a year or two after SJ leaves, he’s going to have to. My mother’s time has come. I am about to watch her End in real time, though, no Endwatching session needed.
I first felt my mother’s pain as I rode the side of the International Space Station, soaring over the Red Sea as the astronauts ate dinner within the windows beside me. It is amazing when you see the Earth from above and realize just how borderless the world really is, this homogenous planet that humans have dissected and sliced into hundreds of separate and warring lands. Up here there are no border lines or patrol gates or minefield-laden disputed territories. There is only sand and sea and city and forest and cloud. You do not hear varying languages or types of music and your eyes do not fall on differing skin tones or styles of dress. You see a rock floating in time, and all the ways humans have changed it. You see one planet, shared by one race, with one common goal: living together. You see home.
And as we hit the edges of India, I get my mother’s distress call, and I head straight for the hospital in Jacksonville. When Cooper got news of the stroke, he dropped everything and drove into the night, too. He was at a writing conference in Missouri, but like the loving and perfect man he is becoming, he left immediately. But I knew my mother had no time left. Every woman in my family had been felled by strokes, and hers had been the most sudden of all. Most people would have been scared in these last moments – humans in general are terrorized by death. This one fear pushes them and propels them through life like a snake behind an elephant, governing all they do and all they feel. It lurks over their shoulder their whole lives. Now that I have dis-attached myself from my fear, I can do whatever I want. Fly in space. Sidle up to cute boys on the sidewalk. Paint that ocean scene. Run that race. But none of it matters, because I am dead. That’s why I push the humans I loved so hard – I want them to do these things before the regret sinks in.
But Shelly Martin Johnson was no friend of regret. My mother lived a good, small, giant life, even in her grief. She never escaped the ghost of me, but then again, no parent of a lost child ever does. It engrains itself into them, tattoos itself onto their heart for eternity. But you can learn to love the memories, savor the pain they bring you. Because that exquisite pain proves that they were here, and that they had lived. And Cooper is about to feel that pain once again.
Cooper arrives just in time, for her life force is waning thin. She is uncomfortable, and she wants to let the black parade take her away. So he sets down his overnight bag, walks into the room. She slowly wakes, looks at him with a mother’s love in her eyes. At the end, you don’t have to say anything. You just know. You feel. You love.
“Thank you, Cooper,” she says, her face looking so different from that summer when she said the same thing to him the first time. He was horrified, but by now, he was an expert at hiding it.
“For what?” he asks. “For coming? It was no problem, the conference was boring anyway, and-”
“For everything. For loving Summer, for loving my son…I just want you to know that if things would’ve turned out differently-”
He leans down and rubs the space between her thumb and her pointer finger while she speaks. It makes her smile.
“I would’ve been so lucky to call you my son, you know.”
He tries not to cry. He is stronger now, and holding back the tears is a bit easier. But still, he is in no way prepared to say goodbye to another Johnson. So he leans closer, and all he says is this: “I was. Always. Always, Shelly.”
She smiles again and lets herself stop fighting. She doesn’t need to wait until Chase and his wife return in the morning, because she is content. Many humans choose when they die, and she was no exception. This was what she needed to see, this was the sentence she needed to hear. She has said goodbye to all of her other family members – blood family, the family she chose, and the family the fates chose for her. You can accumulate family members on the road of life just as you accumulate miles on your car, wrinkles below your eyes, heartbreak on the way to the altar. And my mother and Cooper were bound by so much more than love: they were bound by me. Always.
The horrible and beautiful truth was, they were united in the Summer forever. Their bond became even stronger because of my demise – they became closer after my funeral than they ever would have after my wedding. There is still so much about the universe I do not understand, my death included. But still, I will be forever grateful for the relationships I left behind.
A few minutes pass, and Cooper settles into a chair and decides to get some reading done before he goes home. But he won’t get that chance. At around ten, Shelly knows she is fading quickly. She looks up at the ceiling and sees the light growing, but I know she will not come here. She will hit the Confluence and move straight through. She has nothing left to do on Earth, and this makes me weep with joy. So she lets go and begins slipping into the void, but my tears for her are not borne from sadness. Because my mother won for me. During her life she turned over many stones and drank many beers in many smoky dive bars with many charming strangers and took many spontaneous road trips to many less-than-glamorous weekend destinations and poured all the love in her heart into all the people around her and fell in and out of love with many different men who managed to both surprise and devastate her. Her hair was usually a mess and her kitchen was frequently sloppy and she made all the bad decisions anyone could ever make and she had all the fun in the world doing it. Her life was messy, but it was grand. There is nothing more victorious in this universe or any other, a human life that was thoroughly lived. Do not mourn the ones who leave us in the midst of the party: mourn the ones who sat in the corner and lived with no love, no energy, no dancing in their lives.
As I watch, I feel triumph settle into me, and I am strong. There is a point to my non-life, too. I am learning that much. The reason I know I am growing and expanding and rising as a soul is because I am not sad. When I first got here, I would have begged and pleaded with the stars to let my mother stay on Earth, to keep her there so she could offer comfort to all the ones I left behind. But now I know how selfish that is. I want what is truly best for her, even though it hurts like the devil. Now I both acknowledge and accept that she must not only die, but go straight through to her heaven and bypass mine. I will miss her, but she does not deserve this strange limbo-world in which I find myself. This place is awful, and I will allow her that peace. She needs to go, and I know it. Overriding what your heart feels for what your brain thinks: this is growing up, for better and for worse. I want to send my mother off, a victorious soldier in this battle of life.
I won’t be able to fully shepherd her through to the other side like Mam did for me – I’m not strong enough yet – but I will still head to the Confluence and try to blow her a kiss when her soul roars by. I cannot resist.
But an idea comes to me, and so I do it early. She is slipping quickly, and so I hover into the hospital room and show myself, using more energy at one time than I ever have before. My mommy opens her eyes and sees her daughter, witness to the unreal, lost so many seasons ago, here to usher her mother into the great beyond. I smile to let her know that I am here, that I was always here, that I never left at all. As a human I never really had a father – I had never had that hero other kids had – and this woman taught me what strength was, quietly but surely. And now I want to pass on that gift.
Up until now, the only thing holding my mother back had been me. After all these years, she’d never let me go, not really. I could even feel it in the room. Her ghostdaughter was everywhere she looked, everywhere she went. She could never quite wrap her head around the fact that something had come into the world through her, and then left it. But all at once, I try to cure her. I want her to let go of her little girl.
“She’s still here,” Shelly gasps, as Cooper jumps up and looks over his shoulder. “She didn’t leave. And she’s okay. She was always okay.”
“What? Who’s here?”
As Cooper turns back and takes her hand, Shelly’s mouth drops open and the readings on the machines take a nosedive. I smile, because she will always be mine. And with all the love in the world, I vanish, and one eternally young daughter sends her mother off into the stars.
In the end, you will be two dates. Your gravestone will contain two years: birth, and death. Only a few words will fit in the space below those years. Make them count. Make the story of your life a rip-roaring ride for the ages. I know my mother did. So close your eyes and imagine. Look forward, look backward. Look within.
What will your story be?