## Chapter 2
# Chapter Two: The Blessing of Endings
"It is not length of life, but depth of life." — Ralph Waldo Emerson
---
The shoeshine stand works like this: we work in shifts. My uncle takes the early morning, and I arrive mid-morning and stay through the evening. Six days a week. Sometimes seven. It is routine now, almost like clockwork. The kind of rhythm that settles into your bones and stops asking for your attention.
But the day always begins with coffee.
My wife has a real passion for her latte art, so I will happily drink whatever she creates — a fern, a heart, a rosetta that she insists looks nothing like the picture but I tell her is beautiful anyway. When I get to the stand, I get the update from my uncle. We catch up on everything: the travelers who came through, the shoes that needed more than polish, the small dramas of the morning shift. And then he passes the baton. The world is always moving, but at the stand, not much ever changes, really. These are the moments I can count on. The backbone of the job.
I like the afternoons the best.
That is when the business travelers are back on the move. The airport comes alive, and the chair becomes, in its own small way, like a corner barbershop in a neighborhood. People come for the service. They stay for the conversation. You never know who will sit down, or what they will carry with them.
---
It might sound strange to start a book with a story about endings. But it felt right to me.
In some ways, we only see a life as a whole when we look back behind us. That is the gift time gives — the long view, the perspective you cannot rush. This is why I wanted to begin with the day I first met John and heard his story. It happens to be a story about endings, yes. But for me, it is about something else entirely.
---
John stood out to me immediately.
He was tall. He wore a wide-brimmed hat that cast a shadow over his eyes, and his boots were well worn — the kind of wear that comes from miles, not fashion, the leather shaped by years of walking. He carried a staff in his hand, the sort you do not see much anymore, the sort that belongs to a man who walks because he wants to, not because he has to. He might have been in his sixties or so. Hard to say. Some people carry their years differently.
He was intimidating at first glance. But something about him made me feel comfortable the moment he sat down. I found myself smiling as I offered him my usual greeting, the one I give everyone who settles into the chair. I asked him how he was doing.
"I'm heading to British Columbia," he said.
Then, without hesitation — without the pause most people take, the moment where they decide how much of themselves to reveal — he said, "I'm dying. Six months. Palliative care."
That took me by surprise. In the middle of an airport, where conversations skim the surface of weather and schedules and flight delays, this man laid down the full weight of his truth. Just like that. As though it were the most natural thing in the world.
---
When people say heavy things like that to a stranger, I think we have a couple of choices. We can change the subject. We can walk away. Or we can go with it.
I decided to go with it.
The truth is, I usually do. If someone places something vulnerable on the table in front of me — something valuable to them, something they have carried — how could I ignore it? It is a sacred moment. It really is.
I did not know what to say at first. I pressed gently, as much out of awe as curiosity. "How are you so calm?" I asked him. "How are you so at peace?"
He smiled.
"Because I've lived the life I wanted," he said. "My family is cared for. There is nothing undone. I can go peacefully."
Here is the thing I noticed. The words were powerful — they would have been powerful coming from anyone. But the smile was genuine. It was warm and it was true. There was no disconnect between what he said and what his face told me. None at all.
It occurred to me, right there in the middle of a shine, that not many people could look death square in the face and say the same. And smile as they said it.
---
I ask a lot of questions at the stand. I am genuinely interested in people — it is not a performance, it is not customer service. It is curiosity. Pure and simple. But John told me more about his life without my even asking. It was as though he knew I could listen to what he had to say. As though he had been waiting for someone who could.
He spoke of land he had arranged for his nephew. Of a girlfriend he cherished. Of camping trips still ahead of him.
I could picture the mountains as he described them — the sharp peaks, the clear air, the kind of quiet that only exists away from cities. I could picture the legacy he was building for his family, piece by piece, even now. When he talked about his life, I was transported. To each of the places. To each of the people. He had a way of telling that felt ancient and real, the kind of storytelling that predates books, that belongs around fires and across generations. I lost myself in his story while he talked. I had to remind myself where I was — there, in the middle of a shine, airport announcements droning somewhere in the distance.
When I finally looked up at his face after a few minutes of focusing on his boots, I saw him smiling again.
His joy was not denial. It was acceptance. It was written clearly on his face, in the lines around his eyes, in the set of his mouth. There was nothing to hide, and so he hid nothing.
---
I consider myself a fairly positive person. I tend to look at the present moment as a blessing — it comes naturally to me, for the most part. But it is still a choice I make. Every day. Every moment.
It is easy to get caught up in the news, or the bills, or whatever is happening in our lives. That current is strong, and it pulls at all of us. I choose to step out of it. I choose to see the blessing of now.
As I finished the shine, the afternoon sun was pouring into the terminal. I like this spot for the stand because of the light — it comes through the windows at an angle that makes everything look, I do not know, softer. More forgiving. John's face was shining too.
It touched something in me. Something I did not have a name for yet.
---
Here is what I carry from that afternoon: we do not choose when we arrive on this planet, and we do not choose when we leave it. But we can choose what fills the space in between.
John's gift to me was not in denying death. It was in showing me that life is always richer when it is lived fully in the present moment. Not tomorrow. Not someday.
Now.
---
Months later, I saw him at the airport again.
His body had weakened — I could see it in the way he moved, the way he settled into the chair more carefully than before. But his spirit had not weakened at all. If anything, it seemed brighter. More concentrated, somehow, as though life had distilled itself down to the essentials.
"I was supposed to be gone by now," he said with a laugh. The laugh was real. I remember that. "Life gave me three more weeks."
He was still camping in those weeks. Still smiling. Still teaching me things without trying to teach me anything at all.
---
When I found out about his death, later on, it was not just his absence I felt. It was his presence. The way his words had stuck with me, had settled into my thinking, had rearranged something in the way I see things.
I remembered my father's cancer diagnosis. I remembered my grandfather's passing. The weight of those memories had always felt heavy — grief tangled up with fear, loss tangled up with regret. But sitting with John's story, I began to see them differently.
And I realized: endings are not curses. They are teachers. They remind us to live with depth, not just length.
---
The blessing of endings is not that life is infinite. It is not. We all know this, deep down, even when we do not want to admit it.
The blessing is that its limits make love sharper. They make gratitude clearer. They make each moment more sacred than it would be if we had forever.
---
When I shine a stranger's shoes, I offer polish and brushwork. Those are the tools of the trade. But I also offer attention. Curiosity. Presence. Those are the tools of something else entirely — something I am still learning to name.
Sometimes, in return, I receive the medicine of another's story.
That is what John gave me. His gift was closure — not the neat, tidy kind that wraps everything up and ties it with a bow. The real kind. The kind that reminds you that even as a life ends, it continues. Through the ones who remember. Through the ones who were changed by it.
His story is now part of mine.
And perhaps, through these words, part of yours.