When Something Ends

A meditation on grief, memory, and the losses that shape us

Last week, a good friend traveled across the country to visit the grave of her mother, who died 51 years ago. Why did she do that?

Her act of remembrance stirred something familiar in me.

I recently sold a long-held property that carried deep meaning for me. It was a writing and thinking retreat, and it was also the site of two decades of family and friend gatherings, including the wedding of my son and daughter-in-law.

With the moving date a few months away, I find myself walking the land. I pass the trees I have come to know, the stone walls etched by weather and time, the streams and fields, and the wildlife they shelter. Those walks are becoming my goodbye ritual.

Not long ago, a small circle of friends and I began gathering to speak with uncommon honesty about our losses, our regrets, and the griefs we carry like stones in our pockets. Their transparency reminds me that endings come in many forms, and that staying awake means giving those endings a voice.

Some endings break into our lives like storms:

• The death of a loved one

• A severed friendship

• A sudden job loss

• The ache of a family estrangement

Others drift in slowly:

• A friend you text less often until the thread goes cold

• An undertaking that once felt effortless, and now feels strained

• The absence of a cherished pet that alters your daily rhythm

But endings are never abstractions. They are personal.

When I place names on my own losses - my brother Jimmy, my adopted uncle Joe Felice, my parents, George and Mary, my grandmothers, Ella and Antonina, my grandfather, Francesco, and the extended family members whose departures hit me hardest - Maxie, Aunt Lu, Uncle Vic, Nino, along with my dear mother-in-law, Vi, and my close friend, Rico - the old grief rises again.

I miss them all. And I recognize how each one shaped my life. But I also realize that I have never been fluent in grief. Naming them feels more like a reckoning than a tribute.

Like many leaders, I was taught, by culture and by habit, to solve, to steady, to keep things moving forward. Feelings that slowed me down were set aside, as if tenderness were a kind of inefficiency. I learned how to articulate emotion long before I learned how to inhabit it.

This writing, in many ways, is my attempt to close that gap, to embrace my own losses with more honesty and less distance.

Because endings do not ask to be fixed. They ask to be honored with a simple, human recognition:

Something mattered, and now it is gone.

I tend to move quickly past endings, to find the lesson or the silver lining. The coward in me would rather put a lid on my sadness than sit with it, and feel it. I often minimize grief, by critiquing it as too dramatic: “Don’t linger in your losses.”

What I am learning is that saying goodbye to someone, or something important, is both messy and real.

Whether by choice, by chance, or by tragedy, endings are not failures of life. They are life.

Somehow, for me, the closing of another year has coincided with endings that I want to face. I am not far enough along in my grief awareness to invite you fully into it. I only know that I’m still learning.

But perhaps that is what endings require: not mastery, not fluency, but a willingness to stand with myself in the doorway, to stop the train, look back for a moment, and let the truth of what mattered pass through me.

That, for now, is enough.