part of the termination process is ritualizing the ending

Walking away from Lost last night the air that followed me in my slow walk home was perfect, calm, temperatureless. I felt a little like that when the 2.5 hour series finale ended. Temperatureless. I thought I was going to have an emotional breakdown afterwards, cry and snot all over Liz and the rest I watched it with. But I remained calm, not unlike Desmond does throughout his seeking out of the rest of the Oceanic survivors (or non-survivors!!), like we all should throughout life. I held Liz’s hand a few times, grabbed Kelly’s knee once or twice, but I think that’s what Lost may have been trying to say in the end: sometimes we need to hold hands with each other, touch each other’s knees, eat fish biscuits while stuck in a cage to survive.

Expectations may have been unreachable for our dear prodigies, Jeffrey Lieber, J.J. Abrams, and Damon Lindelof. We all may still be left confused, flabbergasted, asking what happened to Bernard and Rose and why Michael and Walt weren’t in the multi-religion church at the end, and whether Jack will start his life on the island all over again now that he is laying near the white shoe in the bamboo forest like he did in the very first episode, but that’s okay. We should be okay with the fact that there are still questions because there will always be answerless questions, or questions that we have to answer on our own, in the quiet spaces of our souls. Where do they go in the end? They go wherever it is that you want them to go. Was it religious? If you’re religious, sure: it’s religious. If you’re not, it’s not.

I think I learned more from Lost than I had originally set out to on that fateful evening when I watched the pilot. I re-confirmed that past lives can exist, that the most important thing in our lives is the people who we share it with, who shape us, that you can look into someone’s eyes after just meeting them and see that you've known them, you've met them before, that you're the same as you always were and always will be, while at the same time ever changing with the landscape of life, whether you’re on an island or a freighter, all the way sideways or flashing forward and back, we’re always constant, always here, now.