“When Death Comes”

Ted Lasso wrapped up another season last week, and I felt a lot as the finale wrapped up so many storylines (and left some open for another season, hopefully!).

The show ended with a monologue playing in the background of several different scenes. I won’t share too many details, as I don’t want to spoil it for you, but the monologue is a poem by Mary Oliver called “When Death Comes.”

I’ve listened to the monologue and read the poem a few times. And I love so much of it, but I keep coming back to the ending:

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

And as much as I love all of this, I keep coming back to the last line:

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

But what does that mean? What does it look like to not just simply visit this world?

In my own life, “visits” typically has a positive connotation. I enjoy visiting other places on vacation, visiting my family, and visiting my favorite stores and experiences. But I think the commonality is that I am only so present in these situations. I am more likely to dismiss discomfort physically and emotionally because I know I’m only there for a short time. I don’t want to spend a visit sitting with anger or annoyance; I want joy, fun, and excitement.

But what happens when we end up on a “visit” for a while? We end up getting comfortable. We end up sitting with more than just excitement and awe. We reconnect with the full spectrum of human emotions.

But is that bad?

Is it so bad to fully embrace every moment? The good, the bad, and the ugly? Because if we do, do you know what we are left with? Lightness. Freedom. Space. When we deal with what we are going through in the present moment, we meet waves. Ebbs and flows. We have good, hard, spectacular, bad—all of it dynamic and ever-changing.

But if we don’t deal with what's right in front of us? Then perhaps, when death comes, we will still have emotions sitting within us that we never addressed. We will still have a sigh, or fear, or an argument to get out. We will have rigid, stagnant emotions within us that were never given the chance to move on.

So perhaps we don’t give ourselves the chance to wonder if we lived what was real; instead, we fully embrace what is right in front of us. What is real—right now. It won’t always be pretty. But when is a bride-and-groom relationship ever all good? Perhaps we don’t live out of a metaphorical suitcase, only visiting places here and there. Instead, we settle in, unpack, take a seat, and engage with the coming and going of emotions that have a seat at our table.

And when death comes, we will have a plethora of lived, real experiences to recall. The good, the hard, the fun, the bad—we will have real, wholly present experiences to look back on, with a thread of amazement tying them all together.