We reach the end and are by no means done with life.

While reading by the pool in Cancun during September 2024, I came across this lovely passage.  These paragraphs were so compelling to me so much that I needed to re-read it several times before I could continue with the novel.  As I continue this journey into the genealogical discoveries of my family, I see the patterns of names, occupations, travels, familiar lives, and how we can “close the ledger they left open and play their last card for them.”  In sharing stories lost to other branches family, photos, documents, we see our common traits and characteristics as well as special ones that are not held in common.  The wonder of it all. The miracle of how one arrives, lives, and passes from this earth.

From the Novel Find Me by Andre Aciman

You know, life is not so original after all. It has uncanny ways of reminding us that, even without a God, there is a flash or retrospective brilliance in the way fate plays its cards; it deals, say, four or five, and they happen to be the same ones our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents played.  The cards look pretty frayed and bent.  The choice of sequences is limited: at some point the cards will repeat themselves, seldom in the same order, but always in a pattern that seems uncannily familiar.  Sometimes the last card is not even played by the one whose life ended.  Fate doesn’t always respect what we believe is the end of a life.  It will deal your last card to those who come after. Which is why I think all lives are condemned to remain unfinished. This is the deplorable truth we all live with. We reach the end and are by no means done with life, not by a long stretch! There are projects we barely started, matters unresolved and left hanging everywhere.  Living means dying with regrets stuck in your craw.  As the French poet says,

Le temps d’apprendre a vive il est deja trop tard, by the time we learn to live, its already too late.  And yest there must be some small joy in finding that we are each put in a position to complete the lives of others, to close the ledger they left open and play their last card for them. What could be more gratifying that to know that it will always be up to someone else to complete and round off our life? Someone whom we loved and who loves us enough.