Put simply, endings matter because we’re human. Our hardwiring for negativity, assumptions and thinking the worst means that in the absence of good (truth or clarity), we’ll invent the less good.
When our employer, our friend or our lover fails to communicate about an ending, we insert into that void any number of versions of the truth. The harm may be fleeting and forgotten and if we’re lucky, quickly repaired with an apology, a kiss or an explanation. Too often, though, the harm is done and never undone. A small chip is added to the collection.
Choosing endings for my first podcast, wasn’t (just) because I enjoy the perversity of starting the series with a conversation about endings, but because I knew a cathartic conversation would help others navigating theirs.
Starting a career in youth homelessness in south-east London, I was surrounded by multiple, abrupt and unnecessarily harmful endings. Most related to children in care who didn’t understand why they were there, children leaving care who didn’t understand why everything had to change, and children fleeing war-torn parts of the world having never got to say any kind of goodbye, let alone a good one.
This isn’t Hollywood. A good ending is not necessarily one with a happy ending. Rather, a good ending is one where people understand the reason for the ending and it’s voiced. A good ending is where we treat people like adults and explain why change is happening. And when we can’t for reasons of confidentiality, we explain that we can’t for reasons of confidentiality. Still we see in children’s social care (and elsewhere from my experience in housing and homelessness) an obsession with contrived ‘user voice’ and yet continued absence during periods of tough transition of the voices of those whom poor endings affect the most.
As we age we become more familiar both with endings as well as the harm that bad endings cause. We may feel, look or behave battle-weary. Too often we carry the unresolved ending and all the versions of the ‘truth’ we have inserted into it into the next job or relationship. Much of this can be avoided with better endings involving better communication around them.
We all deserve good endings so that we might find some kind of resolution and ultimately, growth. A good ending may look like space and time to process. Where space and time are sadly unavailable, this can still be provided later on in way that is flexible and compassionate.
However sudden or gradual the ending is, we must make time for an open and accountable conversation, for gratitude, for a celebration, a marker of another kind or merely for an acknowledgement of differences. Without it we store ill will and assumptions that have little grounding in reality and continue to shape our’s and other’s lives.
Let’s put the humans at the heart of good endings.