How It Ends Isn't the Whole Thing

Aug 01, 2025

This is part three of a four part series on professional and career endings. This essay will make likely more sense if you read it after part one “Closing a Chapter.” and part two “Ghost Ships, Grief & Gratitude“ Additionally, there was an unexpected pause—“I Need More Time”—because sometimes endings aren’t linear.

Do you have friendships like this?

The kind where years go by without any real contact, but you’re delighted to receive the text: “Hey, I’m coming through town, can I crash with you for a night?”

That was the gist of Mark’s text in the last month of 2023.

Our answer: “Yes! Look forward to catching up.”

It’d been four years since our family last hung out with Mark and his wife, Brenda. (These aren’t their real names.) The six of us spent part of a fun, wintry week in the snowy Sierras. Now we had a lot to catch up on. Mark’s new work that brought him to California. The house project. The dogs.

When I asked after Brenda, Mark’s voice sounded less casual when he replied, “I’m not sure if you know, she retired last year.”

“No,” I gave a short shake of my head. “I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, she did.” His tone was careful.

I didn’t need details. And Mark clearly didn’t want to share a story that wasn’t his to tell. Which I appreciated that about him. But I did have one question.

“Was she celebrated? I asked, simply. “Did she get that kind of a retirement?”

Mark shook his head, “No.”

All I could say was, “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

Mark’s visit occured in December, just as I started seriously thinking about retiring from my denominational ministry.

I carried Brenda’s retirement story—the very little I knew of it—like a small stone in my pocket through the next several months.

Through my conversation with Parisa, where she witnessed my shame and disappointment. As I submitted the official retirement paperwork. When, perched on a stool, surrounded by plastic file boxes, I reviewed twenty-five-plus years of my professional life.

By March, I was far enough into my career re-view to see how colleagues and friends had held up a more expansive vision of my work. When I focused on what I hadn’t achieved professionally, it was these good people who told me: “We see something different.”

They held up a longer, larger view of my career, until I was finally able to see it.

Maybe I could pay it forward to Brenda and point to a larger vision of her career, not just the ending.

So I wrote her a note, describing what I admired about her career advocating on behalf of people often taken advantage of by large, powerful economic interests. I honored her commitment to the common good and thanked her for it.

Would I have written that note if I’d not experienced my own end-of-a-career struggles? 1 Maybe not. Probably not.

But I know it felt good to write.

It turns out, endings are complicated in another way.

How an experience ends (along with its peak moments) determines how we remember the whole thing.

Would you nerd out with me a little bit?

I’ve been mildly obsessed with the late Daniel Kahneman since March when I learned about his assisted death in Switzerland a year before. He was 90 years old and wasn’t known to have any life-threatening medical issues. He chose the time and place of his death, with family members by his side.

I’m curious about how and why people make the decison to use medically assissted dying. Given that Kahneman was a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who revolutionized the study of human decision making, he and his choices interest me.

As I learn more about his research, I’ve considered it in relation to all sorts of endings, including Brenda’s retirement experience.

In an interview recorded at the end of his life, Kahneman described his contribution to the “study of well-being” as explaining that human beings have two selves: an experiencing self and a remembering self. They aren’t the same.

Here’s a transcript from part of that conversation:

I described in a talk I gave, I described an experience that I found very striking, that somebody was telling me after my talk that he had an experience. And the experience was of listening to a piece of music on a record, and at the end of the symphony, there was a terrible screeching sound. And he added, and it ruined the whole experience.
And I told him, no, you'd had the experience. You'd have 20 minutes of very good music, but it ruined the memory of the experience, which is really separate. So separating those two, you know, that's my only contribution to the study of well-being.”
Lives Well Lived, May 22, 2024

Kahenman goes into the experiements and the research in a little more detail in his TED Talk “The Riddle of Experience v. Memory.” But here’s the bottom line: people can experience something they describe as negative while it’s happening, but if the ending is more positive, their memory is more positive. A longer, more painful experience (in one case, a colonoscopy) was remembered more positively (than a shorter, overall less painful colonoscopy, but one that had a painful ending) because the end of the experience was less painful.

This is called the Peak-end Rule. Here’s a simple description. And here’s the less-simple one.

In his TED talk, Kahneman says

“What defines a story? And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us, and it's also true of the stories that we make up. What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. Endings are very, very important.”

So, what do we do with this?

If our experience of an ending is crappy, are we stuck with that?
Or is it possible to modify our memory of it—other than the passage of time?
Can we actively give our memory of a crappy ending less weight, by focusing on a larger vision?
How do other people figure?

These are the questions I’ve been rolling around in my mind over the last couple months as I thought about professional endings, retirement and Brenda. And how lives end.

As a minister, I lead communal memorial rituals to mark the ultimate ending—death.

Whether they’re called funerals or memorial services or celebrations of life, I believe in these rituals for every death. They’re particularly important when a death is unexpected and/or shocking—whether for a child or younger person or because of the manner of death or death by homicide or suicide.

In these deaths, some survivors struggle to comprehend anything beyond the manner or unexpectedness of the death. The wrongness of the ending.

A memorial ritual doesn’t change that—or how—a life ended. It doesn’t change the experience of their death or the memory of it.

But the ritual can create a larger, collective container—first to gather people together in a particular place, at a particular time. Moving mourners from isolation into community, increasing the odds of connection.

After bringing people together, the memorial ritual serves as a container for honoring the now-deceased person’s whole life. Not just the ending. Not only the recent past. What I call a “good” memorial service is one that acknowledges and honors the fullness of a life—no matter how many years it was lived or its ending.

The pull I felt to write to Brenda seems related to the pull to honor a whole life.

If Daniel Kahneman’s research was accurate, then the ending of her career—what sounded painful and disappointing—was likely sticking with her. I wanted to say to her: I see you. I see what you did across the whole expanse of your career.
How it ended isn’t the whole thing.

This is what I’ve come to understand, at least for now.

How anything ends—lives, jobs, relationships, marriages—isn’t the whole thing. Even if our remembering self’s cognitive bias leans in that direction.

I’m curious: what have you come to understand, at least for now, about endings? Does Daniel Kahneman’s work connect with your experience? Have other people helped hold up a larger, broader vision for you, when you couldn’t?

Please feel free to share your experiences and thoughts in the comments. I’m always glad to hear your thoughts.

Marking What Matters

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