The Dangerous Myth of "Good Endings"

11 years ago, I made the shift into personal injury law.?It has been an incredible ride and I have never regretted the path that I have chosen.?But there was something that was initially jarring about my line of work.?Namely, as a newly-minted personal injury lawyer, I was shocked at how many of my cases involved wrongful death claims.?And, to be clear, these deaths were not the elderly in nursing homes.?The cases that found their way to my desk involved (and still involve) the unexpected and often unpredictable passing of people of all ages and in all different walks of life.

In litigating these cases, part of my job is to tell the story of the person who passed.?For example, I want to show the contributions they were making to society through their work and community involvement. I want to show the hopes and ambitions they had for the future which will never be realized.?Their passions.?Their hobbies. ?Their convictions.?Their gifts.?I also try to help the jury understand the emotional fallout the survivors are experiencing as a result of the decedent’s passing.?To use a metaphor, when one person wrongfully causes the death of another, it is as if someone uprooted a plant from the garden of our society.?The more extensive the plant’s roots, the greater the hole that is left behind.?A large part of my job is to help the jury see that hole and understand just how deep and how wide the decedent’s “roots” must have reached into the lives of others.

At least, that is how it is supposed to happen.

But it was not long into my work before I realized that this was the hardest part of the job.?It was not that I struggled with telling a story, but that I often lacked the material needed to make it a good one.?All too frequently, my investigation revealed that the “roots” did not run as deep or spread as far as one would have hoped. ?

I was telling the story of someone who never realized his or her professional potential and who was not even remotely attempting to do so.

I was telling the story of someone whose relationships were all but pulseless.?Stories of estranged parents, spouses, and children, who now had no hope of ever setting things right.

I was telling the story of someone who never rose above his or her vices, but remained subject to them right until the very end.?Someone who left the world with a bleak, cynical, and angry view of life.?Someone who made it a habit to see the worst in others, and rarely had the joy of seeing the best in them.?

The repetition with which I experienced these types of stories opened my eyes to how na?ve I had been for the first 30 years or so of my life.?Specifically, I had always assumed that life was carrying us towards a destination—a good ending of sorts.?Of course, I did not believe it was carrying us towards a happily ever after. My early military experiences in combat made it perfectly clear that was not the case. I always knew that suffering and adversity were the unavoidable realities of the human experience.?Nevertheless, my presumption up until that time had still been that life would allow us to have a “good ending” in the sense that our final chapter would in some way permit us to realize our spiritual/moral potential, set our wrong relationships right, and depart with a feeling of purpose and peace with respect to the life we have lived.?

But my work has confirmed for me over and over again that this idealistic view of storybook endings is far too Hollywood to have any grounding in the real world.?The hard truth I have had no choice but to accept is that real life is, in many instances (although not universally), a much sadder state affairs.?In the movies, people forgive and relationships are reconciled before death.?In real life, grudges only die with those who hold them and broken relationships stay broken forever.?In the movies, even lives that have been largely wasted find some form of purpose or redemption in the end.?In real life, people waste their lives and miss what is important up until the very last second.?There is never a change of direction.?Stated another way, I see now that there is no shortage of people who lived and left this life without ever finding their good ending.?It is a sad truth to embrace, and one that never becomes any less sad, no matter how many times I see it play out.

And the corollary of that truth is alarming—if it happened to them, it can happen to me. ?It can happen to you.?No one is safe from the possibility of a bad ending and none of us have a special claim to a good ending.?However, whenever we start to internalize this truth, our instinct is to chase such thoughts away and to buy back into the myth of good endings.?Why wouldn’t we??It comforts us to think that “someday” we will do the things we should be doing, love the way we should loving, and live the way we should be living. ?

But the complacency permitted by such thinking is itself the source of so many bad endings.?With a correct perspective, embracing reality is neither depressing nor morose.?Rather, it can help us to see the urgency of our situation.?The things that matter in the big picture can never be “someday” priorities.?They have to be attended to today.?Indeed, because of this realization, I now set aside time most mornings to remind myself of just how high the stakes are with respect to the day ahead of me—i.e., I remind myself that unless I spend the day as the father/husband/family member/friend/professional I had always hoped to be, there is a very real (and ever increasing) possibility that I will never become that person.?In other words, unless I write a good ending today, I am risking a bad ending.?In viewing the day that way, choices are made with greater care, priorities are formed with finer clarity, and even minor tasks and interactions carry so much more significance than I previously assigned to them.?At bottom, our best hope for a good ending is to make sure that every page we author from this day forward can itself be a good ending if need be.?Marcus Aurelius once wrote:

“Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.”

That is timeless advice, and we would all do well to heed it and not let the myth of good endings chart out a bad ending for us. ???