Quiet Endings

Not every dream ends with a bang – some slip away quietly. But there's grace to be found in quiet endings and there's sacredness in letting go.

Photo by Persnickety Prints on Unsplash

I listened to a hiking podcast recently. The woman being interviewed, who was attempting to thru-hike the 2,000+ mile Appalachian Trail, had to get off the trail due to Hurricane Helene that struck the Southeastern part of the United States.

As she hunkered down in the hotel room where she heard the news, she learned it would be the end of her attempted thru-hike due to damage on the trail. She found it odd that her ending would be so quiet. She backtracked to a more suitable place and sat there for a moment to think about her experience, even though it wasn’t quite complete (she was 700 miles short).

Life is like that, isn’t it? We leave a place of employment to start our own business but there’s little fanfare as we walk out the door. We hide our bowling balls in storage, knowing our knees, necks, and arms can no longer handle it. We walk off the tennis court with a sinking feeling that we will never play again.

There was no fanfare in December 2023, when I bowled my last game. Nor should there have been. Nobody knew it would be my last time, including me. And even if they had, there would be no reason for fanfare.

But I need to back up.

A couple of weeks earlier, pain shot through my right arm as I attempted to bowl in a league again after taking nine years off. And then my arm went numb. That freaked me out a bit, but it went away.

Then, in December of that year, my lower back started to hurt one night after bowling, and it continued into the next day (it really hasn’t stopped since). Turns out that I had two medical conditions going on at the same time – a pinched nerve in my neck (causing pain and numbness in my arms), and degenerative changes in my lower spine (which are age-related and cause pain when bending or lifting).

So that 488 series I shot in December 2023 was my finale. I can’t imagine slinging a 15-pound ball down an oily alley ever again.

Prescription meds have helped. And so has lidocaine cream. Oh, and seeing a massage therapist. I know, it’s a lot, but the combination has me feeling pretty good again.

But something deeper had shifted – something I didn’t notice right away. Dreams don’t always end with clarity. They often die in the dark. Not with a bang, but with a whisper. Not with a ceremony, but with a quiet realization that something we once loved, once chased, once believed in has slipped quietly out the back door. That’s what happened to me.

It’s just another piece of this world that has to die. We shouldn’t hold on to anything too tightly.

One day, Chuck Swindoll talked to Corrie ten Boom after a worship service. As he spoke about his grandkids, she picked up on something and wasn’t afraid to speak into it. In her mind, Swindoll might be holding on to his grandkiddos too tightly.

“Pastor Svendahl,” she said in her Dutch accent, “you must learn to hold everyting loosely … everyting. Even your dear family. Why? Because da Fater may vish to take vun of tem back to Himself, und ven He does, it vill hurt you if He must pry your fingers loose.”

Easier said than done, but it’s probably really good advice.

With that said, there’s something sacred about quiet endings. They don’t demand attention. They don’t ask for applause. They simply are. And in their silence, they invite us to listen more closely to what we’ve learned, to who we’ve become and to what might be next.

Sometimes, we don’t even know a dream has died until much later. We just stop showing up. We stop practicing. We stop hoping. And then one day, we realize we’ve moved on – not out of failure, but out of change, growth or necessity.

And that’s okay.

Not every ending needs to be dramatic to be meaningful. Maybe the quiet ones are the ones that shape us the most – the ones that teach us how to let go with grace, how to mourn without spectacle and how to honor what was without needing to resurrect it.

So, if you’re sitting in the quiet right now – if something you loved has ended without fanfare, then take heart. You’re not alone.

And the silence? It might just be holy ground. Trust God, even in the silence. He’s still at work.