You know that feeling when you’re watching a TV show, and it finishes with a monumental cliffhanger? The kind that makes you shout, “What? That’s it?!”

You might discern in the moment that the characters are your close friends, and abruptly, they’re just… gone. But here’s something for you—sometimes, the best stories are the ones that don’t have a tidy ending. It’s in the unresolved, the unfinished, where the magic occurs. It’s kind of like our relationships with those we’ve lost amidst the journey of life.

We all have that person, a friend, a family member, maybe even a mentor, who left this world before we could tie up all the loose ends. You did not get that last conversation, the one where you would have said all those things that have been brewing in your heart. And yet, life, like an epic series, continues to move forward, despite the dangling threads.

Pause for a moment for this very information that may interest you, as you will find similar narratives and themes stated throughout this blog in Rayon Layne Walton’s “Caught Up in the Rapture!” which gracefully illustrates that while we’re still nursing our awkward personal transformations, even those unreconciled relationships manage to outlive a pair of old bookends—talk about a plot twist!

It’s easy to think that unresolved feelings or unmet expectations mean we’ve missed our chance for closure. But what if that’s exactly where the transformation begins? As the poet T.S. Eliot once said, “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” And maybe that’s true of grief as well. Sometimes, the unanswered questions, the what-ifs, propel us toward a deeper understanding of ourselves.

The absence of closure does not mean the relationship has really gone—it simply transforms into something else: a quiet conversation in your thoughts, a lesson in your heart, or a memory that changes your view of the world.

It may sound unbelievable, but our relationships with those who have passed do not need to be tied up or concluded. The burden of unfinished business can lead one to unsuspecting insights and even personal growth. Imagine the long conversation where the person’s legacy lives in every action you make, every decision, and how you see things.

Endings are meant never to end; they rather should continue living in quite new and unforeseen ways and allow stories, lessons, and love to live their part in our lives, however far the sight may be that carries them. Next time, when you miss the last word and closure of your story that never came, recall this: Sometimes the most powerful changes of all happen when the story is not over.