Beginnings and Endings
“I love thinking about beginnings. Like that story my aunt used to tell in the back garden: When the Creator finished his creation of the world…he shook the remaining clumps of clay from his hands and they fell to the sea and formed this island.”
Endings have touched my life this week. A sentence from Songbirds, a book I am reading this week by Christy Lefteri - I don’t like endings, though I suppose I’m like most people in that. An ending can be staring you right in the face without your knowing about it. Like the last cup of coffee you have with someone when you thought there would be many more.”
Then, a line in an email - I remember reading engagement announcements, then birth announcements, and now I’m reading obituaries.
Then more serious endings. A dire cancer diagnosis. An unexpected death. A devastating fire. I turned to Isca Salzberger-Wittenberg, author of Experiencing Endings and Beginnings: From Birth to Old Age, wanting to learn more.
I had planned to write about my personal experiences of beginnings and endings in this blog post, particularly the many endings that face us as we grow older. Yesterday, I went online to clarify a quote by Witternberg. The first link that popped up was her obituary. Isca Salzberger-Wittenberg, Holocaust survivor, child mental health champion, and psychotherapist, died last month at the age of 100. And so, instead of sharing my story, here is some of Wittenberg’s wisdom. I hope her words will help you, as they did me, in thinking about endings.
Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending. - Longfellow
Beginnings and endings are deeply intertwined, writes Isca Salzberger-Wittenberg in her book.
“Beginnings tend to be associated with hope and excitement. It is the hope invested in new experiences that make us look forward to them and seek them out. But that is not necessarily so. Starting something new can also be difficult and make us anxious. For instance, having to do a course to be employed, may be dreaded; or, being promoted to a senior job may be looked forward to but the responsibility that goes with it is fear.”
“Beginnings also require us not only to let go of what we are familiar with but also to relinquish something that we may value or some advantage associated with the previous state…”
Salzberger-Wittenberg writes that while we tend to associate endings with fear and dread, there are exceptions. For instance, the end of a miserable, restricting marriage may bring relief; a person who is in agonizing pain, progressively disabled, may long for her life to end; and leaving a country where one is persecuted is a life-saving event.
At 96, Isca Salzberger-Wittenberg was still seeing five patients a week. At 97, missing her beloved cello, which she could no longer play, she began taking piano lessons. In an interview when she was 96 years old, she spoke of the importance of endings, citing her own experiences with loss. Those losses, she shared, “…made me aware of how important it is that endings should be thought about and how often they are not thought about. Before they happen, you have to prepare yourself, early or late in life. And that is a question of people not preparing themselves for the losses, or for the end of life itself. And also, things being broken off suddenly or without any thought about how important that relationship might have been. How much it will be missed and to try and preserve it in your mind by actually mourning the loss.”
In the same interview, she spoke of her deep interest in spirituality, nature and the universe.
“I spent many, many years getting quite old, thinking how I can link both the psychological way of thinking and a religious – anyway – a spiritual life so that it enables me to think about what’s beyond this life, beyond this planet…”
“So many people relate to nature in a very emotional way. Trees, for instance, evoke in us feelings of strength, of protection, protection from the sun; to the sea; to rivers. I think very many people do. The question is whether, it’s really, whether it’s just nice, or it has meaning for you? That it makes you think of, what’s the source of energy? What’s the source of life? And you’ve got it in nature in the most fantastic way. You put something in the earth and it grows, it blossoms – it also fades away. Trees are, actually, unlike that, they go on for a very long time. But flowers, no, they change very rapidly. So, it makes you think about life. Is everything in life transitory? What is growth? And to think of the end, as well and the fading away.”
“The winters of our lives are hard teachers. But their lessons can be life-giving—if we face into the season and ask the right questions as we go.”
- Parker J. Palmer
In her book, Wittenberg asks, ’What makes it possible to accept the transience of life, to bear increasing losses, face the loss of one’s own life and yet go on growing, gaining or at least maintaining emotional and spiritual strength?’ The interviewer asked her, what do you think the answer is? She responded -
“I’m not sure that it’s possible for everybody. But I do think, just basing what I’ve said all along, it is a matter of really being grateful for what you’ve got and every day we experience it as a gift. That life is a gift – rather than something we deserve. Why am I alive? I mean, by sheer accident that one is alive, and to learn to be grateful for that…accept it as a gift that doesn’t last forever, and I think, I hope, that people can come to that point through the work we do in terms of in their own family, being grateful for what has been given to them by their parents, but accepting that they’ve lost their parents.”