On Finishing: Finding Completion

Of the three part series on beginning, continuing, and finishing, this post has been the most difficult to write. This reflects our individual and collective struggle to end well - something we rarely accomplish in Western cultures. For many clients I have worked with abrupt, unexplained, and distressing endings or abandonments by early attachment figures have generated the challenges that brought them to therapy. Ending a project or a living situation also have a significant impact, as anyone who has ever been made redundant can attest.

I've been reflecting on the hard questions that finishing asks us: Can we complete, and would we recognize the feeling of completion if we have it? Is there anything left when we finish and let go, or do we feel lost, alone, and without any purpose? Do we hang on or delay finishing at all costs? How often is our difficulty with starting or continuing a project or relationship due to a fear of it ending?


As much as endings tend to evoke our patterns and feelings from all of our past significant endings, they also confront us with the existential truth of our uncertain future and the unpredictability of death. If we have a belief in an afterlife, is our faith strong enough to deal with existential anxiety? If we don't have such a faith, do we feel that we've lived meaningfully enough and left enough of worth behind to die content?  


If the questions above have raised some degree of anxiety in you, then you're probably not alone. Somewhere amidst the questions, fears, shame, and guilt that difficult endings can evoke, are also moments of grace - if we can access them. As the Western world shifts to more freely acknowledge the ultimate ending of death, this reduces the internal and interpersonal censorship that prevents us acknowledging and sharing our experience of endings. Talk with somebody you care about, about an ending that's important to you from your past, present, and future. You'll probably be doing both of you a favour, and you might even taste a moment of grace, or freedom. Endings matter when that piece of life that is ending has mattered, and conversely, sometimes our life matters only when we can allow the endings to matter to us.