The Sense of an Ending

 

Going to put the 

bins out two hours after dark,

I grab the nearest scarf to warm my neck. 

I made it for my mother, imitating autumn leaves.

I love the way the aliveness of them shrinks inside

leaving the unnecessary casing empty and dry.

My mother has also condensed inside, her

liveliness shrunk to precious glimpses.

Soon her wonderfully wrinkled case 

will fall from the family tree,

as leaves all 

must.

People talk about winter as the time when everything dies back. But I went into the garden this morning, and with the soft heaviness of water in the air I was drawn to the camellia bush. The white petal balls shone like Christmas lights in the early morning. Under my shoes the grass-green grass seeped dew into my footprints.

I love camellia flowers for the damp tissue paper texture of their petals. There are even the transparent lines where they have folded, as if they really are made of tissue paper. They are so delicate it’s a miracle they don’t tear. They are white at a time when nothing else in the garden is white. The greys, brown-blacks behind and the deep blue-greens of their own leaves set them off as if someone intended them to be fine. Compact and multilayered as the petticoats at the Folie-Bergere. What coy secrets do they hide behind that intriguing froth? But they’re flirting with the insects, not with me.

I love camellias for the used teabag look of the older flowers on the same bush.The dense moist orangey-brown colour that on a dress would be a joy. It only signifies loss to me because of the delicate sister beside it. 

Two camellias from the garden today, my photo

Camellia flowers are both alive and dead on the same bush. Alive, Dead, Alive, Dead. There is melancholy in the loss of the exquisite after only a few days of blooming. La Dame aux Camellias dying at the height of fragile perfection. But there is also satisfaction in the rightness of it, the fated change from alive to dead. The exquisite is fascinating not despite it’s imminent death but because of it.

I remember when I was doing psychotherapy, as the patient and as the therapist, how much more powerful the experience was when it was about to end. It's true. Therapists use that fact to precipitate change. 

When a holiday is young we sit around resting. When it is nearly gone we try to do everything so we won’t have any regrets when we return home. 

How the poignancy of old age in the important people brings our love and gratitude to a point. The sense of an ending is the lens that magnifies the love. The lens that makes us thankful. 

So this ending, the ending of the year, is about thankfulness and love for what is still alive. The gratitude for being alive, for being with people that matter to us, for the grass, the oxygen, the body however decayed it might already be, that blesses us.

And what if we remember, at other times of the year, when we are approaching the end of each season, each term, each month, each day, that this too is an ending that while it could bring regret and grief, can also bring magnified appreciation for what, and who, is right here, right now.