Happier Endings by Erica Brown

Author:Erica Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Chapter Six

A Different Bucket List

He did the dishes,

Rubbed my feet,

Surprised me with tulips,

Took me to musicals even though he didn’t like them,

Carried my bags while I did the shopping,

Held my hand.

He died of cancer four years ago.

Because he loved me,

I can stay in our home.

I can be here for our children.

I can afford to pay for their college education.

I can worry about the other things in life besides money.

He still loves me. And he still shows it.

You may be moved to tears by this poem, but don’t get too excited. It’s actually the text of a magazine ad for life insurance sponsored by Life, a nonprofit life insurance company. I found an old Newsweek while scrounging for reading material at the gym to get me through the tedium of an elliptical workout. The poem was on the back cover. It made me pause. I never really saw life insurance as an expression of love, but there it was in black and white. I was meeting someone in a poem who did not leave unfinished business for his family to sort out at a time of grief and loss. This woman still felt the impact of her husband’s love years after he died because he made financially responsible decisions to provide for her and their children. And this is one critical key to creating a happier ending: using time and money wisely to leave a legacy, to take care of whatever needs to be done so that you can leave the world in peace.

Not all of us get the death warning with enough time to tie everything up nicely in a bow, especially with sudden deaths, like Alyssa’s. And it’s not only personal finances that need tying up. It’s the emotional odds and ends of a life that may need healing or repair. It’s all the dreams and ambitions you held on to that may or may not get fulfilled. Death is more than the end of life. It is the annihilation of wishes and unrequited longings. It is the end of a conversation. It is final.

Viktor Frankl speaks famously of unfinished business as a rationale for survival in a book often cited as one of the most influential works of the twentieth century, Man’s Search for Meaning. His central thesis, born out of both research and personal experience as a Holocaust survivor, is that the people who stand the greatest chance of survival are those who have goals to achieve, projects to finish, people to see. It matters less what the direct object of survival is—in other words, why someone needs to do a particular something; what matters is the drive to do that thing. Often people who have a reason to live or a sense of meaning in their lives can actually muster the ambition to survive circumstances that would easily swallow those without the same drive. It is not a guarantee, just a strong motivator.

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