Murry Frymer
It was getting close to the end of the hour and I was surfing the channels. First one movie and then a cop drama and then another movie. One was sad and one was happy and one was a tear jerker that I had cried over a while back.
And then I had another one of those once-in-a-lifetime
insights (for you -- for me, once 
in a week) about fiction. It has meaningful endings!
That's the wonder of it, the joy of it. We leave the movie theater
enthralled because it all ended so beautifully. Or we are still
laughing at the surprise laughs at the end. Or we are in tears
because of that gorgeous deathbed scene.
But life isn't like that, not usually. The trouble with life is the ending, or rather endings, because we have lots of them in the average life. Love affairs end, marriages end, jobs and careers end and, of course, life itself comes to an end. And whoever is writing those stories usually blows it.
Endings in real life just sort of come upon us and drift away. Often you don't even know it is an ending. You never see the girl you had a fight with again. You didn't know you wouldn't but you just didn't. What's the point? Where's the slow fade as she looks back at you with a tear in her eye? Where's the music?
You walk out on a marriage and you stand in the street and look around searching for something meaningful. Nothing. You stop in a pizza place because it happens to be nearby and you order a slice and you say to yourself, hey, I'm divorced and the whole scene says: So what!
When my father lay dying in a hospital in Ohio, there seemed little to say. We hadn't talked much in all the years and there was nothing to say. So I said I was going back to California but I would return. I doubted that when I said it. He probably did, too, but I don't know. There were no camera close-ups.
I walked to the elevator and I hit the button. Hey, jerk, I said to myself. You may never see your father again and you haven't talked. Go back and talk.
But I didn't. Instead I took the elevator down and walked to the car and drove back to my parents' house and suddenly decided to stop and see a movie. Why? I don't know. Whoever was writing this poignant scene was a klutz. So many of my lifetime poignant scenes have been written by the same klutz.
I never did see my father again. He curled up in a bed and moaned with pain for a few more weeks and died. My mother sat with him and cried. There was no music.
Sherwin Nuland, a kindly old doctor at Yale Medical School, wrote a fine book a few years back titled "How We Die." It won the National Book Award. Anyway, when I interviewed him in a Bay Area restaurant we talked about my dad and his dad and his brother whom he had watched die.
"There aren't many beautiful deaths," Dr. Nuland said. "Most people die ugly and they die painfully. That just happens to be what dying is like."
Well, we can hope for exceptions. What we can hope for is something thought up in a Hollywood studio where all the loose ends are tied in ribbons, where all the good intentions are understood and appreciated and where love overwhelms the scene. Where there is music.
As for me, I would like one more time at bat. In my final Little League game some 50 years ago, the championship game, the coach was ready to pinch-hit for me in the late innings, but the inning ended before he could. So I took the field and when a critical fly ball came at me, I froze and misplayed it and the other team scored the go-ahead run.
And then in the bottom of the inning, the coach did pinch-hit for me. And we lost the game for the championship. And I felt lousy and a few of the kids blamed me for misplaying the fly ball. And I blamed myself.
And I went home and dreamt it all over again for months. Or maybe it was years.
That's no ending. I am waiting to come up to bat one more time and swing and hit that ball a mile and win the game and get carried home by my teammates.
In Shakespeare's plays, as he put it, "All's well that ends well." But in our lives, damn it, most of us know the endings need work.
© 2000 by Murry Frymer
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