Once Upon a Time (Not So Long Ago) . . .

I’m super excited to have been invited to join a blog group alongside three talented bloggers.  Each week, one of us chooses a topic and we all post a blog entry on that topic, usually on Thursdays.   

Here are the links to the other fabulous blogs:

Merryland Girl

Froggie

Moma Rock

This week, I asked my fellow bloggers whether there is such a thing as a “happy ending” (and not the dirty kind).  After a little bit of snickering, here’s my take:

                  In high school, I read the book The Natural by Bernard Malamud.  Odds are you know the story of The Natural not because you read the fabulous novel but because you saw the movie starring Robert Redford as the bat-wielding protagonist, Roy Hobbs.  In your mind, you’re picturing a smiling, blond Redford running the bases as the overhead park lights burst like so many fireworks, the crowd cheering, Redford’s Hobbs crossing the plate a hero.

                  Um, yeah . . . no.

                  I read the book version of The Natural long before I saw the movie.  More accurately, I devoured the book.  I could not put the damn thing down.  When the movie came out, I couldn’t wait to see it.  I loved the book; I’d have to love the movie, right?

                  Wrong.

                  I hated the movie.  Hate.  Hate.  Hated it.

                  And I didn’t hate the movie just because of that old-school “the book is always better” reason, the one that seemed to explain the destruction of other favorites like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (I’m looking at you, John Cusack) or A Civil Action.  The film version of The Natural is actually well done.  It’s decently acted and beautifully set.  My problem was the ending.  The damn movie people changed the ending.  They ruined it.  They made it happy.  

                  Malamud’s Hobbs is not a hero.  He’s actually kind of a jerk.  The title of the book is meant to be ironic.  The ending of the book isn’t happy, nor should it have been written to be so.  It’s a tragedy written in the vein of the mythical Fisher King, a baseball pennant the Holy Grail.  Myths usually don’t end well, and a happy ending would have ruined the book.  For me, it ruined the movie.  Some stories aren’t meant to end well.  Some stories simply cannot end well.

                  My favorite book in the entire Universe is The Great Gatsby.  It cannot be argued that Fitzgerald’s novel ends happily.  But it ends correctly.  There could be no happy ending for Gatsby; he wanted too much from too many.  Had Gatsby ended up with Daisy, he would still have been unable to relinquish the demons that haunted him.  He’d never have felt worthy, and he could never, ever erase Daisy’s time with Tom.  The book ends as it should, which is likely why it remains a classic, loved by generations, loved by me.

                  I don’t know that I believe in happy endings, mostly because endings are almost always inherently sad.  What would a happy ending look like?  For a couple in love – the most commonly cited example of a happy ending – doesn’t one person almost always die before the other, even if they live to a ripe old age?  And even if the couple somehow dies together, let’s say in an accident, is it really right to describe that as “happy”?  Is that the proverbial walk into the sunset?  Did Romeo and Juliet, then, have a happy ending?

                  I believe we search for happy endings simply because we so strongly fear the end – of anything, really.  We dream of “ . . . and they lived happily ever after” because it doesn’t force us to think what happens after that.  I’ve never thought of life to be so neatly packaged.  And, clearly, forcing such an ending feels unnatural to me (no pun intended). 

                 

                  However, I do believe we can find the happy in an ending.  Recently, I attended the funeral for a woman who was like family to me.  She was half of one of those “happily ever after” couples, two people madly in love and completely devoted.  She’d met her husband at a wedding; they’d married six months later and they remained married for more than fifty years.  When he died in 2002, her children grieved their father and worried after their mother; the parents had been so close, the kids feared she wouldn’t last long without him.  A few short years later, the mother was diagnosed with dementia.  The first person she forgot was her beloved husband.  When showed photos, she’d ask, “Who’s that?”  Her kids were devastated – at first.  But then they began to see this new loss – this new ending – as a bit of a blessing.  Their mother’s illness had brought a kindness of sorts in that it cut short her grieving from more than a decade to just a few years.  The youngest daughter would come to call it a gift. 

                  Perhaps whether an ending is happy is, like much else in life, a matter of perspective.  To me, a happy ending is a true ending.  It flows from the circumstances.  It isn’t forced or fake.  It isn’t Gatsby and Daisy walking hand in hand across the pier, and it isn’t Roy Hobbs saving the day thanks to the pen of a Hollywood screenwriter.  A happy ending is what we make it, in the end.