Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome ― Isaac Asimov
I’ve never really understood why endings have such a devastating effect on me, beyond the obvious sense of loss that accompanies them. A relationship ends, and with it all the dreams of what could have been, and even the dreams of what it actually was. A loved one dies, and a part of you is obliterated with them, even as your love for them lives on. Maybe especially under those circumstances. A parent dies, and a heavy curtain falls around all of the life that went before.
I totally understood, and was actually grateful. One less sad goodbye to try to get thru without getting damp and weepy.
The death of the Queen has been given a solidity this morning, a form and reality today that it didn’t have until now, with the beginning of what will no doubt be a splendid, dignified, fairly brief final farewell (the Queen abhorred unnecessarily boring people, and had planned her final exit for many, many decades), after the limbo of the lying-in-state.
The incredibly elaborate, heavy Crown of State …
The young Elizabeth I, and the old Elizabeth, who said sadly at the end of her life,
“I have lived my life in little rooms ….”
So an emblem of dignity, charm, grace, and careful, invisibly wielded power, based solely on the profound strength and depth of character of a diminutive woman with a very large, very heavy crown, is gone, and what takes her place is uncertain in the current age of brassy crassness that was ushered into our consciousness in 2016, and spread rapidly thru the world like an invisible pandemic, a great, grey slimy pall infecting everything it touched, turning it tawdry and cheap and without saving grace or meaning.
The unsettling uncertainty about what’s to follow …
The radiant young Queen .... Elizabeth II a few days before her death, welcoming her last Prime Minister ...
The Queen has died. An age is gone. And ahead lies uneasiness and uncertainty, in a world already brimming with about as much of that as it needs, wants, or possibly can even handle …