The Sequel

“’THE END’, is just the beginning in disguise.”

        

You read the words, “THE END.”

You close the book, place it in your lap, and reflect. 

“The End.”

“The End?

“The End!”

But you still have questions.

Inquiring minds want to know. 

The author infers “that they all lived happily ever after,” yet you know that’s impossible. And even if they lived “Happily Ever After” then think what a burden it would be to live “Happily Ever After.”

Could you live with that stress!

You’d be constantly asking yourself, “Are you Happy now? Are you still Happy?”   

It’s just as well. The princess and prince haven’t changed. We know the princess remains a power-hungry overachiever at heart, and the prince is still a steroidal idiot who swings first and thinks second.

And if they have kids, “Whoa, that’s worth at least a trilogy to sort out all those issues.”

You re-read those words, “THE END.”

At the culmination of a memorable book, those words make one feel like a motorcyclist who slams into a chain-link fence going eighty miles an hour. Your body may have stopped, but your mind keeps asking, “What now? What’s next?” 

You want “More!”

On the far side of “The End,” a new story begins.

Yes, yes, you have lost your author, your guide. But for the author, “The End” is their way of telling their readers, “So long, suckers!” Yet for us, the readers, those characters live on and some of them have left muddy footprints all over our minds.

“What to do, what to do?”

“I got it. This is what you can do!”

You gather the book’s characters together in the den like a classic Agatha Christie novel. Yet instead of figuring out whodunit, you must decide who will do what next. In the novel, the princess is kind-hearted, not a gold-digger, and the prince aspires to be a better dad than his own father. 

Oh, and let’s not forget the evil witch who leaves behind an orphaned daughter who needs a home and someone to love her. 

Ah, now we are getting somewhere. This is the start of a truly dysfunctional family structure. This is what great novels are made of. We’ve got the golden princess and prince struggling to raise the daughter of the evil witch who was trying to kill them.

And did I mention that the little witch is a teenager?    

How could the author not have sown this fertile material?    

The days of our lives are but pages in a book. Some novels might be more easily digestible than others, but each of our stories has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Yet even if we were to have the words, THE END chiseled onto our tombstone, our deaths aren’t ‘THE END.’

The ripples of our lives continue beyond the confines of our graves, past the pages of our lives.

Your life’s reverberations could be as apparent as the tears streaming down your children’s faces as they lower your body six feet into the ground. Or as subtle as a fading memory of when you held the door open for the young mother pushing a stroller.     

We do not end at the End.

The good and the bad of your living days color the lives of all those you’ve encountered along the way. Your slightest kindness or most flippant slur will circulate the globe forever.

Let each day remind you that the dust of your life will settle upon the earth, and from it will sprout either sweet fruit or bitter weeds.

As your corpse decays or your ashes flitter away, understand that “THE END” is just the beginning in disguise.

THE END

Listen to this story.

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