A funny
thing happened recently. In the space of
two weeks, I realized that my certainty about the final episodes of two
well-known TV series was in error.
Robert and I
were talking about finales. I maintained
that in “The Wonder Years,” Kevin’s voice-over (Daniel Stern’s, actually) let
us know that after high school, he and Winnie Cooper never saw each other
again.
In fact,
Kevin relates that he and Winnie wrote each other a letter a week for the next
eight years. And that when Winnie
returns from Paris, where she has been studying art, Kevin meets her at the
airport with his wife and eight-month-old son.
(This is all from Wikipedia, by the way.
It kind of rang a bell when I read it.)
Similarly, I
was positive that Ross and Rachel didn’t end up together in the final episode
of “Friends.” Absolutely positive.
All this has
me thinking about memory, which is much on my mind anyway, as my 94-year-old
mother is succumbing to dementia. And
about stories, and about endings.
As writers,
we pay a lot of attention to endings.
Some of us even start there. (I
don’t, but some of us do.) If we are
serious about our work, we go to great pains to craft an ending that makes
logical sense and offers a satisfying conclusion to the story line without
veering into sentimentality or “over-neatness.”
At the same time, we try to end
things. No leaving it up to the readers’
imaginations, a non-solution that in all but the rarest of instances smacks of
creative cowardice.
I’m sure the
writers of “The Wonder Years” and “Friends” spent a lot of time writing those
endings. But I made up my own anyway.
So what does
this mean? Are the endings over which
writers pore unimportant?
Of course
not. Endings matter enormously. But I look at my inclination to rewrite mentally
the endings of beloved TV shows as indicative of 1) the fact that I tend toward
the gloomy (notice that in both instances, I assumed the worst) and 2) the
splendid “spells” the shows’ writers cast over the duration of both series’
runs. Kevin and Winnie and Ross and Rachel
lived in fully realized fictive worlds, so real to me that I felt I knew them
as actual people.* Re-imagining their
stories’ conclusions speaks to the verisimilitude the writers created, itself
the result of masterful writing (among other things).
(*Do other
people talk about TV characters as though they are real people? My best friend and I do it all the time. Sometimes we will sheepishly acknowledge what
we’re doing, just to reassure ourselves that we haven’t lost all touch with
reality. But then we keep on talking.)
My mother’s
memory fades from week to week. She no
longer reliably remembers that she grew up in Cleveland, that she had a beloved
brother who died young, that I was married to Brian, that I have a son and a
daughter.
When she was
first diagnosed, I kept trying to remind her of things she forgot or swore she
never knew at all. Gradually, I have
learned not to do this unless she asks me to.
In
forgetting almost everything, she is rewriting her own ending.
At this
point, I think it is more painful for me than it is for her.
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