1There is a door at the end, and I will go through it, and I will not come back. Put it down in plain words, once, at the top of the page. Now it can be looked at.
2For most of my life I did not look. I knew it as one knows a fact about a far country. Then a friend my own age went through, and it became a fact about this one.
3What exactly do I fear? Let me sort it. There is the pain of dying, and that is real; but it is a matter for healers and for courage, and it ends. There is leaving those I love, and that is real; but it is their loss more than mine, and I can do something about it now. And there is not being. That is the strange one. I try to picture it and I picture darkness, silence, a long waiting. But those are things someone is there to feel. If I am not, there is no dark, and no one waiting in it.
4There was a very long time before I was born. I was not lonely in it. I do not recall that it troubled me.
5The Keepers promise nothing beyond the door. I have turned this over for many years and I find I do not need the promise. Would the kindness I did be more real if I were paid for it later? Would my daughter's laugh have been worth more if I could remember it for ever? It was whole when it happened. It did not need anything added.
6A song is not a failure because it ends. A song that never ended would not be a song. It would be a noise that nobody could bear.
7If there were a payment after, then doing right would be a trade, and a shrewd one. Since there is none, it can be a gift. I would sooner my life were a gift.
8The Last Door closes for one. What that one opened stays open. I say this to myself often, to keep it exact. It does not say I go on. I do not. It says the ways I opened do not close behind me: the child who can read, the field that is still good, the man who was forgiven and so forgave his son. They go on out of sight, opening others. I will not see it, and it does not need me to.
9A life is not measured by its length, any more than a road is. What matters about a road is where it lets people go. I have known short lives that opened more than long ones did.
10How long have I left? I do not know, and that is a mercy and a task. A mercy, because I can still plant. A task, because I may not put off till the last year what should be done this week.
11So, this week. Is there someone I have not forgiven? Someone I have not thanked? A thing I know that I have taught no one? A quarrel I am keeping warm? A truth I owe? Do these now. They are of no use to anyone on the other side of the door, and I do not know how near it is.
12Keep the house in order. Pay the debts, write down where things are, say who is to have what. This is not gloom. It is a courtesy to the people who will be tired and sad when they have to open my cupboards.
13Illness is the body's weather, and it is in the Far Hand. But I can meet a storm well or badly. I can take the remedies or sulk at them. I can make my sickness the only subject in the house, or I can ask the others about their day. And I can be afraid without making my fear into everyone's chore.
14When I am ill, I learn what I am without my strength. I learn it without my work, and without my use to anyone. It is a bare lesson. If I find that I am still someone, still fair and still awake to others, then the illness has shown me something health never could.
15To be cared for is hard for one who has always done the caring. I want to wave them off. But think: they need to give this. If I refuse it, I shut a door on them to save my pride. Let them wash me and feed me. Thank them, and let it be a good memory for them when I am gone.
16Long pain narrows the world to the size of the body. Fight that, as far as I can. Ask about the garden. Have someone read to me. Keep one window open on something that is not me. The pain may take the body, but it should not have the whole house.
17There may come a time when the mind itself goes dim, and I am no longer the one who chooses. I cannot rule that, and I will not pretend to. So let me choose now, while I can: say what I would want, pick whom I trust to speak for me, and thank them ahead of time for the patience I will not be able to thank them for then.
18Old age is not the Last Door. It is a room of its own, with its own work. The old are the memory of the house. I know what the flood of forty years ago looked like before it came. I know which quarrels blew over. My task now is to say these things when asked. It is the harder half of the task to keep quiet when I am not.
19Do not be an old one who hates the young for having time. They did not take it from me. I had mine.
20I catch myself saying that the world is worse than it was. Is it? Or is it only that I am leaving it, and would find the leaving easier if it were not worth staying for? Be fair. There is as much to love in it as there ever was.
21A friend is dying and I am afraid to visit, because I do not know what to say. Go. There is nothing to say. Sit by the bed. Talk of ordinary things, if he wants. Let him speak of the door, if he wants; do not hush him with "you will be up in no time." He knows better, and now he must comfort me as well as die.
22The young die too, and the good, and it is not fair. It is not anything. The Weave does not weigh merits. If there is to be any fairness about death, it lies with us: that we waste no one's days while they have them, and that we are fair to people while they live.
23Is it wrong to be afraid? No. Every living thing pulls back from the door. That pull kept my forebears alive long enough to have me. I can feel it and thank it, and still not let it drive.
24The fear of death, left to itself, closes ways long before death does. I will not travel, in case. I will not love, because I might lose. I will not begin the long work, since I may not finish. The door has not come, and I have already shut most of the others myself.
25Take the High Look at my own ending. From far above and far ahead, see the long line of lives: each one lit, each one going out, the line going on. See the ember handed along, from hand to hand to hand. I am one hand. It was never going to be otherwise, and I would not want the line to stop with me so that I might hold the ember for ever. If I kept it for ever, I would be only a place where it stopped.
26If nobody died, nobody could be born. There is only so much room at the table. I sat down because someone got up. When I think of the ones waiting to come, with their new eyes, I do not grudge the chair so much.
27Will I be remembered? For a while, by a few. Then by none. I used to mind. But who dug the well in my village? Nobody knows. The water is cold and sweet. I would rather be the well than the name on it.
28To want to be remembered is to want to go on being fed by others after I am gone. To want my work to go on is different: that is wanting them fed.
29I will leave things unfinished. Everyone does. The wish to finish everything first is a wish never to go. So look at the unfinished things. Hand on what can be handed on, with a clear account of where I stopped. The rest I must let go without bitterness. Someone will take up some of it, in a way I would not have chosen, and it will be theirs.
30The body goes back. The water in me was rain and will be rain. The salt was sea. The matter of my hands was in stars before it was in bread. None of it is lost from the Whole. Only the pattern stops, the particular knot in the Weave that said "I." I am not sorry to have been a knot. It was a great piece of luck.
31They will mourn me. I cannot spare them that, and I would not want to be so little loved that I could. But I can make it a clean mourning. I can leave no lie for them to find and no quarrel open. No one should be left wondering if I forgave them.
32Tell them now that they owe me no long sorrow. Tell them to weep and then to eat, and to marry again if they wish, and to laugh without looking over their shoulder. It is good to make a will for my goods. It is better to leave people free to go on living.
33How should I go, if I am given the choice of how? Awake, if I can be. Without complaint, if I can manage it. With a word for each person there. If I can do none of this, because the pain is too much or the mind has gone, then that too is the Far Hand, and those who love me will know it was the sickness and not me.
34My last acts are still acts. Suppose I have one day left. I can still thank someone and tell one truth. I can still make someone less afraid of their own dying by how I meet mine. That last one is no small Opening. Each of them has that door ahead too, and they are watching to see how it is done.
35Here is something I did not expect. The nearer the door, the plainer the teaching. On my last day there will be no future for me to gain by doing right. No reward could reach me, and no one's good opinion could be of use. If on that day I am still kind, and still tell the truth, and still give the nurse her thanks, then I will know I was never doing it for pay. I would like to find that out.
36Do not envy those who will see what comes after. I saw what came after others. Everyone has an equal share of that, which is a little.
37I walked the dark road before night for the ones I love. Walk it also for myself. Picture the last morning. The room, the light, the faces. What do I wish I had done? Now open my eyes. It is not that morning yet. I have been handed the list.
38When they tell me the sickness will not be cured, I think the first day will be very bad. On the second I may notice that the bread tastes as it always did. From then on I will be living as everyone lives, toward a door. I will only be doing it with my eyes open.
39Each night I go into a dark where I am not, and I go willingly, and I even long for it when I am tired. I do not say death is sleep. Sleep has a morning. I only notice that it is not the dark itself I dread.
40I do not need to be at peace with death every hour. Some nights I am not. I lie there and it is very large. On those nights I do not argue with it. I get up and do some small thing for someone who will be here tomorrow: set out the bread, mend the child's shoe. By the time it is done, the size of things has come right again.
41What is a good death? It is the end of a life that left ways open. The manner of it matters very little: a bed or a ditch, with people round or alone, at ninety or at thirty. A good death is made in all the days before it, and I am making mine now.
42If I have lived by the teaching, then when the door comes I have nothing to settle. I did not put off living. I am not owed a reward that has failed to arrive. I did what was mine to do, and it was its own pay each day, in full. So I can go as a reaper leaves the field at dusk when the grain is in. He does not look round for someone to pay him, for the barn is full and that was the pay. He shoulders the sickle, leaves the gate open for those who will sow, and goes.
43And if I have not lived by it, I can begin today. Then I will have lived by it for as many days as there are left, and that is also a life.
44The door is not the enemy of my life. It gives the life its edge. Because of it my days are few, and so each one is worth something, and the people in them, and what I do for them.
45When it comes, may I be found with the tools still in my hand.