THE PROBLEM WITH CONCLUSIONS [2-18-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—THE PROBLEM WITH CONCLUSIONS [2-18-23]

 

One day in June, 8 years ago, two of my closest long-time friends died on the same day. Bill and I were clergy and couples friends for 55 years. Mike and I became friends when we were ten years old. He died 68 years later.

Bill was in the hospital for several days. His children and grandchildren came to see him or if they were too far distant, called him. He got to say goodbye to them and to friends like us. I felt good about the conclusion of his story.

Mike took his grandchildren to a movie and out for ice cream. Then he went home and sat in his recliner to wait for supper. He dropped off to sleep and never woke up. I felt good about the conclusion of his story.

Their conclusions were so different, but both were good.

This comes to mind because I have had trouble with the conclusions of several CIW columns recently. Most of them I have not posted. I did not feel good about their conclusions.  Some I posted anyway. Then I felt even worse about their conclusions.

Both as a reader and as a writer, I’m aware that the conclusion of a story is the hardest part. I can tell when an author just gave up because she couldn’t figure out how to end the story. The worst one was an early novel by a now highly-respected writer. I was really enjoying the book. It had so many different mysteries unraveling. I was looking forward with excitement to how he would bring them all together. But he didn’t know how. He had gone down all these promising avenues and couldn’t find where they went. So he had his protagonist sit on his back porch at the end of the book and say, “Well, I guess I’ll never know who Susie married and who killed Ralph and whether the twins got away and…” It was the worst conclusion ever!

So, first, I apologize for my own poor conclusions. Normally my thinking about a column starts with the conclusion. But sometimes there is a story that I want to tell, and I get it told, except for the conclusion, and…

But I knew how I wanted to conclude this column when I started. It’s about concluding life, which is why I started with the ways Bill and Mike concluded their lives. I like to start and end in the same place, the way Garrison Keillor usually did with his Lake Wobegon monologues. But how do you, how should you, go about writing the conclusion of your own story?

Well, that’s as far as I’ve gotten…

John Robert McFarland