Don’t Let it End: Suburban Outlaw Pam Sherman Can't Let Go
April 12, 2018
I’m terrible at endings.
Graduating from school, moving out of a city, saying goodbye to friendships that need to be ended. It’s probably why I hate to leave a party—I mean, who wants a party to end? (Beyond, maybe, the hosts who need to clean up at some point.)
I’m even bad at written endings. Who knows, this column could just go on and on. But thanks to my editor, eventually we’ll come up with an ending.
I especially hate vacations to end. Everyone does (unless you’re on some cruise from hell). Think about it: You leave all your cares behind and move into a place where they change your towels every day. Who wants to end that arrangement?
My husband has been dealing with my hatred of endings for more than 30 years. When I’m about to end a big project, he won’t make eye contact with me. He knows huge emotions will ensue, and it won’t be pretty.
At least he can feel secure in our marriage, knowing how bad I am at ending anything.
My problem with endings started way back as a little girl. When my parents took me to the theater, I’d start crying when the stage lights went down and I would cry all the way home. I didn’t want the magical experience to end.
At summer camp, I would weep for days at the end of the season because I knew I wouldn’t see my camp friends again for another whole school year.
Every time I was about to move on from a school—even one I hated—I would suddenly realize all the wonderful things I would miss about the place. This was especially true of the big life moves I’ve made.
When I graduated law school and we were about to move from New York City to Washington, D.C., I fell apart. We had planned our move for months. As the move date loomed closer, I found myself not wanting to get out of bed. I got emotional about everything I was leaving behind.
I wasn’t just upset about missing the big things like my family and our awesome rent-controlled apartment. I also cried about the places I hadn’t visited in New York before we left, like the Cloisters, a museum dedicated to medieval art. The Cloisters aren’t first on most people’s New York City bucket list. It may not even average 37th. But suddenly, ending our New York sojourn would forever be marred by having not visited the Cloisters. (Never mind that, in the three decades since that move, we’ve been to New York countless times but never once visited the Cloisters).
The same thing happened when we left D.C. to move to Rochester. I cried over the friends, the doctors, and yes, even the traffic I was leaving behind. The day we left, I threw one last pizza party right after the movers drove away with all our furniture. It was our daughter’s third birthday, so I had a good excuse. Finally, my husband looked at me and said, “It’s time.” I recall clinging to the banister so hard that I’m certain my fingernail marks were left behind for the new owners to buff out.
But driving away while wiping tears away, I realized why I hated this particular ending. It was because a very special moment in time was done forever.
The few years we lived in that house were magical for our family. We had wonderful new neighbors with kids the same age as ours, and all the parents and kids had a blast playing together. The kids would run between houses, safely, and the parents would sit in one of them enjoying the pandemonium around us. I didn’t know these people for a long time, but they came into my life during a particularly difficult time after a dear friend had died (the ultimate ending), when I really needed new and fun friends.
When we decided to move to upstate New York I didn’t want that perfect bubble to burst. I couldn’t look ahead to what would come, I was just locked onto what was ending. I didn’t realize at the time that the life we would end up living in Rochester would be equally as sweet, with great friends who I didn’t know yet and a wonderful community that I eventually embraced.
As I’m writing this, the Winter Olympics have just ended at the same time my own epic personal experience has ended: playing Erma Bombeck in a production of Erma Bombeck: At Wit’s End at Geva Theatre Center. I can’t help but think about the transition for young, world-class athletes who spend their whole lives planning for that fleeting two-week experience—then it’s over, and they have to live their lives in a new way.
The same is true in theater. We enter rehearsals hopeful the experience will be special. You instantly create a new family dedicated to one thing—putting the show on. In my case, this was the incredibly special experience of doing it for the first time in 13 years. And then the last audience applauds and leaves, the set is torn down, the costumes are put away. The show is over.
Steve Rosen, who co-wrote and starred in The Other Josh Cohen this season at Geva, says, “Every show has one thing in common. It closes. Theater is a business of goodbyes … As storytellers, it is our sad but necessary duty to allow the story to end so that we can begin to tell the next one.”
But that’s the point of endings. They need to happen because without them we don’t know what we’ve learned, what to appreciate and even the possibilities for our future.
Dr. Joanne Pedro Carroll, the renowned local clinical psychologist, reminds us that life is a series of endings and adjustment to endings.
“Transitions are a kind of rebirth; part of the circle of life. In many ways, how well we navigate these transitions shapes our future. A healthy goodbye acknowledges, with gratitude, the good things that were experienced and became a part of who we are, even as we move on.”
The day after my last show ended, I woke up feeling all sorts of things: exhausted, energized and, yes, sad. I even made my husband record the last applause from the last audience so I could listen to it any time I needed a little pick-me-up.
The best part is I can breathe now and appreciate the experience and all I’ve learned from it. To be honest, the best part is that—for the first time in months—I don’t have to wake up with those lines in my head any more. I can make space in my head for new words. Words I might say to the clients I work with or words I might write.
Sounds like a perfect transition, right? Except that, every time I try to move on, the husband (who was the show’s biggest fanboy) keeps repeating lines from it back to me at random times throughout the day. Looks like I’m not the only one who hates the end.
As first published in the Democrat and Chronicle and USA Today Network.