The robe set down

An ending is a kind of mirror. What it shows us — about what we held, what held us, and what remains when the holding stops — is rarely what we expected to see.

We do not get to choose most of our endings. We choose, at best, how we stand inside them: whether we stay long enough to say what needs saying, whether we let the thing close cleanly or leave it ragged, whether we mourn the loss honestly or paper over it. The wisdom traditions have argued for thousands of years about what endings mean and how to meet them. They have not arrived at one answer. They have arrived at several, and the disagreements are part of the inheritance.

A time to every purpose

Begin with the oldest observation: that endings are not anomalies but seasons. "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance." ^[1] The Preacher of Ecclesiastes does not lament this; he names it. Endings belong to the same rhythm as beginnings. There is no plucking up without something first planted, no mourning without something first loved.

Marcus Aurelius, writing privately to himself in the second century, returned again and again to the same arithmetic. "This life is short. Both he that praiseth, and he that is praised; he that remembers, and he that is remembered, will soon be dust and ashes." ^[2] He was not being morbid. He was trying to scale his ambitions properly. If even the praise we hunger for will be dust, then what is the right size of a day's worry? He pressed himself: "Dost thou grieve that thou dost weigh but so many pounds, and not three hundred rather? Just as much reason hast thou to grieve that thou must live but so many years, and not longer." ^[3] We accept the dimensions of our bodies without complaint. He thought we should accept the dimensions of our time the same way.

The Hebrew scriptures put the same fact more lyrically. Man "cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not." ^[4] The Epistle of James reduces it further: life is "a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." ^[5] Even the orderly catalogue of Pirkei Avot — Scripture at five, Mishnah at ten, the bridal canopy at eighteen, wisdom at forty, counsel at fifty, fullness of years at seventy — closes with the same understated finality: "At one hundred, as good as dead and gone completely out of the world." ^[6] The catalogue is not a promise. It is a measuring stick laid against a vanishing thing.

Nature's appointment

If endings are seasons, then death — the largest ending — is not an enemy. Several traditions insist on this, though they reach the conclusion by different routes.

Marcus again: "Is any man so foolish as to fear change, to which all things that once were not owe their being? ... How then dost not thou perceive, that for thee also, by death, to come to change, is a thing of the very same nature, and as necessary for the nature of the universe?" ^[7] He puts dying alongside teething and the growing of a beard: "such a thing is it also to be dissolved." ^[8] The Qur'an states it as a flat law: "Every soul shall taste of death." ^[9] Pirkei Avot is bleaker, and honest about the lack of consent: "Against your will were you formed, against your will were you born, against your will you live, against your will you will die." ^[10] Death does not ask permission, and neither did birth.

The Bhagavad Gita reframes the whole question. Krishna, finding Arjuna paralyzed on the eve of battle, refuses to grant the loss its weight: "Thou grievest where no grief should be! ... the wise in heart mourn not for those that live, nor those that die." ^[11] His image is famous and worth keeping in its original cadence: "as when one layeth His worn-out robes away, And taking new ones, sayeth, 'These will I wear to-day!' So putteth by the spirit Lightly its garb of flesh, And passeth to inherit A residence afresh." ^[12] The body is a garment; the wearer outlasts the cloth.

This is a consolation — but notice that it works by partly denying the loss. The Dhammapada will have none of it: "Sons are no help, nor a father, nor relations; there is no help from kinsfolk for one whom death has seized." ^[13] Death comes alone to each, and no relation, however loved, can step into the breach. Both things may be true: the spirit changes robes, and yet no one can die anyone else's death.

What goes with us

If the body is set down, what — if anything — is carried out? The traditions are nearly unanimous on what is not: wealth, station, the praise of the powerful. The Qur'an asks of the rich man who scorned the good: "what shall his wealth avail him when he goeth down?" ^[14] Pirkei Avot puts it plainly: "When a man passes away there accompany him neither gold nor silver, nor precious stones nor pearls, but Torah and good deeds alone." ^[15]

Confucius made the same point with two small histories. "The duke Ching of Ch'i had a thousand teams, each of four horses, but on the day of his death, the people did not praise him for a single virtue. Po-i and Shu-ch'i died of hunger at the foot of the Shau-yang mountain, and the people, down to the present time, praise them." ^[16] Four thousand horses against two starved brothers; the horses lost. He set the standard for his disciples even higher: the officer's burden is "perfect virtue," and "only with death does his course stop." ^[17] One does not retire from being good.

Marcus turned this into a simple test for each action: "Upon every action that thou art about, put this question to thyself; How will this when it is done agree with me? ... Yet a very little while and I am dead and gone; and all things are at end." ^[18] The shortness of life is not a reason for despair; it is a filter for what is worth doing. Confucius reached the same place by a different door: "If a man in the morning hear the right way, he may die in the evening without regret." ^[19]

How to mourn

But what of those left standing at the graveside? The traditions take the question of mourning seriously enough to legislate it — and to warn against doing it badly in either direction.

The Confucian instinct is for measured, full-bodied grief. "A superior man, during the whole period of mourning, does not enjoy pleasant food which he may eat, nor derive pleasure from music which he may hear. He also does not feel at ease, if he is comfortably lodged." ^[20] The reasoning is tender: "It is not till a child is three years old that it is allowed to leave the arms of its parents. And the three years' mourning is universally observed throughout the empire." ^[21] You give back the years of being carried. The grief is the receipt.

But excess is also a failure. The ancient ode, Confucius observed, is "expressive of enjoyment without being licentious, and of grief without being hurtfully excessive." ^[22] And worst of all is the empty form: "mourning conducted without sorrow;-- wherewith should I contemplate such ways?" ^[23] The rite without the feeling is hollow; the feeling without the rite is unmoored. He sacrificed to the dead "as if they were present," ^[24] and when a friend died without family, he said simply, "I will bury him." ^[25] Someone must do the burying.

The Hebrew Bible offers one of the most patient images of grief in any tradition. When Job's friends came to him in his catastrophe, "they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great." ^[26] They were wrong about much else, but here they were right. Some endings are met by sitting on the ground without speaking.

The Stoics counsel something different, and we should not pretend they don't. Marcus admired Apollonius for being able, "whether in the sharpest pains, or after the loss of a child, or in long diseases, to be still the same man." ^[27] To sit unmoving in shiva is one shape of dignity. To lose a child and remain "the same man" is another, and a harder one to recommend. The traditions do not agree here. Let them not agree.

Living in earshot of the ending

Knowing endings come, what changes in how we live? The Dhammapada is uncompromising: "The world does not know that we must all come to an end here;--but those who know it, their quarrels cease at once." ^[28] If you remembered, fully, that the person across the table from you will die and so will you, what would you still be willing to fight about?

The Buddhist counsel goes further than most are willing to follow. "Let, therefore, no man love anything; loss of the beloved is evil. Those who love nothing and hate nothing, have no fetters." ^[29] This is not the Gita's robe-changer, nor Ecclesiastes' time to mourn. It is the cold, clean logic of attachment: if loss is the wound, love is the opening. Most of us will not take this path. But it stands there in the canon, refusing to be softened.

The Dhammapada also offers its terrible image of distraction: "Death carries off a man who is gathering flowers and whose mind is distracted, as a flood carries off a sleeping village." ^[30] We are nearly always gathering flowers. The flood is always near.

Against this, Marcus offers a quieter posture. "Let death surprise me when it will, and where it will, I may be εὔμοιρος, or a happy man, nevertheless. For he is a happy man, who in his lifetime dealeth unto himself a happy lot and portion. A happy lot and portion is, good inclinations of the soul, good desires, good actions." ^[31] The life rightly lived can be interrupted at any moment without being incomplete: "as of an actor, that should die before he had ended, or the play itself were at an end, a man might speak." ^[32] The play does not need a fifth act to have been a play.

What death does not touch

Finally, several traditions point past the ending to something they claim it cannot reach. The Gita names it: "higher, deeper, innermost--abides Another Life, not like the life of sense, Escaping sight, unchanging. This endures When all created things have passed away." ^[33] To the one who lives rightly and dies with "mind set fast and trustful piety, Drawing still breath beneath calm brows unbending," there is "happy peace." ^[34] The Qur'an extends the same invitation in its softest voice: "Oh, thou soul which art at rest, Return to thy Lord, pleased, and pleasing him: Enter thou among my servants, And enter thou my Paradise." ^[35]

Ecclesiastes, which began this chapter by naming the seasons, offers a stranger sentence: "A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of one's birth." ^[36] Better than the day of one's birth? Perhaps because, by the day of death, the name is finished. The shape of the life is at last visible. What kind of name was made of it can finally be read.

And the twenty-third Psalm, which has been carried into more rooms of dying than perhaps any other line: "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever." ^[37] Forever is not a claim we can verify. But the line has been a kind of furniture in many endings, and that itself is part of what wisdom traditions are for: to give us something to set down beside the dying, when we have run out of our own words.

Questions for the reader

• Think of an ending you handled well, or one you wish you had handled better. What did you not yet know at the time that you know now?
• Which of these postures toward death is closest to yours — Krishna's robe-changer, the Stoic's actor whose play can end at any line, the Buddha's flood that takes the flower-gatherer, the Psalmist's house of the Lord? And which one do you think you are avoiding?
• If you remembered, all day today, that the person across from you will die, what would you stop arguing about?