I’ve been working with the concept of closure. It started with my writing professors—one of them keeps telling me I’m sloppy with my ending, I need to pay closer attention, and finish strong, I can’t just leave my readers hanging without hope or something to hold onto, to transition them away. (My words)
I’ve been thinking lately though, that closure is not finite, for me nothing really ends. There are periods of transition, sure, but ending, finish, final, closure—there always seems to be something that leads into the next thing. My yoga teacher says, “Finish one thing the way you want to start the next.” I’m not sure I know how to do this.
But I do know that death is the only real closure I get in this lifetime. It’s not something to be feared or to worry about; the notion of death is simply a transition time, for the next thing, moving forward.
After a glass of wine with mom the other evening, and having our conversation lead to God and death and children as it does occasionally, she helped me to realize that perhaps the karma we incur in this life is not really for later in this life, or even in the next “life,” but rather it’s a protective force in the times of transition between life and death. It’s in the bardo that we need our karmic points the most. The Tibetan word, bardo, literally means interval or gap—I came to the conclusion that it’s important to gain merit (good karma) in order to fend off lingering daemons we may encounter during this period of transition, this gap called death.
I do not want any daemons from this life in the next, that’s why this closure must start with paying off my library fines. $19.57.
