The Bittersweet Poetry Of Endings

I was listening to The End by The Doors the other day. Jim Morrison first wrote it as a breakup song—young heartbreak set to a brooding melody—but over months of live performances at the Whisky a Go-Go, it grew into something much bigger. Something final. A song about endings in every sense of the word.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about endings, too.The kind that sneak up on you, the ones you don’t see coming. The end of a job, a marriage, a school year. The quiet fade of a friendship. The last conversation you didn’t realize was the last.

Recently, I lost a few friends I grew up with in Parma—guys I’d known since first grade. If I’d known the last time I saw them was the last time, I would’ve hugged them harder, told them what they meant to me. But life doesn’t work that way. We never get a warning label for endings.

The thing is, every story has a final page. Every door eventually closes. But does that make endings something to fear—or something to embrace? Maybe the trick is to recognize them for what they are: the punctuation marks that give meaning to the sentences before them.

Maybe there’s always light at the end of the tunnel. Or maybe, as Morrison sang, this is the end, my only friend, the end.