After The Story Ends: Embracing Change, Especially When We Least Expect It
Devrie Donalson is a soon-to-be-published author known for her fast-talking, wit and profound vulnerability. The relatable tales she spins over social media are full of heart, humor and more than a touch of inspiration. Devrie leads by example, gently goading her current audience of over 750k to take the first step on journeys of self-love, independence and adventure.
In August of 2020, my grandpa, an 88-year-old man who was born as steady and sure as he’d prove to be every day of his impressive and honest life, died suddenly of a brain bleed. There was no extended illness – no winding journey toward goodbye dotted with peaks of jutting hope and longer valleys of slow grief. Sometimes death announces its arrival from far away, bouncing the sound of trumpets off the landscape of your life miles and miles before you can spot it on the horizon. But sometimes, it collides into you with such force and suddenness it leaves you dazed, blinking, and unable to recognize yourself at all.
By that September, my grandma had sold the house they’d spent the last fifty years calling home and was downsizing the gallery of their life into a few small boxes that would fit into her new, one-bedroom apartment in a retirement community. She said goodbye to the cul-de-sac she’d rounded tens of thousands of times and to the winding green she’d spent countless hours walking, first with her children as little boys and now alone. She said goodbye to the familiar swoop and bump of her driveway. Goodbye to the hummingbirds that relied on Grandpa’s sugar water to always be fresh. The neighbors who had been brought home from the hospital and raised on Kingspark Court until they themselves moved away and began families of their own were shocked to learn that the Donalsons, who had been a fixture of the community since their first breath, would no longer be the residents of the house at the end of the street. After 63 years of marriage to the same man, over fifty years of life in the same house, and so much time being a wife, a neighbor, and the mother who always makes the same candy in her big, sunny kitchen for Christmas, it was gone. All, entirely gone.
She moved into her new apartment with too much furniture, too many photos, and barely enough space for her and her little dog. Another round of cuts from the few treasures she’d kept after we cleaned out the house saw the end of heirlooms her father had given her and the table she’d served her first dinner on as a wife. She had to choose only her favorites of the portraits of her family - people she’d once spent crowded holidays with as a little, ribbon-haired girl, but whose names no one on Earth remembered but her. She woke up in an unfamiliar place and bed, but with the same robin egg blue blanket, her mother knit for her. She ate a familiar breakfast of scrambled eggs in an echoing dining room bustling with other octogenarians she’d never met before. Hi, Howard (he used to be a surgeon), Ronnie (she used to be a writer), Claire (she used to be a teacher), Julie (her daughter is a local politician), Richard (he used to be an artist), Kathleen (she has seven children she never sees), Jacqueline (she used to be a flapper girl), Margret (she had three husbands who all died before her). She went to the community store, walked around the pool deck, and checked a box next to what she wanted for lunch the next day. Then she fell asleep in an unfamiliar bed with a comforting blanket and dreamt of a house on Kingspark Court where a man played with a little dog outside.
Every day my grandma woke up in a life where almost every single thing was different from the life she’d lived before. Her only constant companions were her rescue dog, Posh, the echoing spaces in her heart, and the clingy, overbearing demands of Change. After spending so much time living in the happy ever after, it wasn’t the ending anyone saw coming.
I’ve never had a conversation that started with “What do you want to be when you grow up?” conclude with “And who do you want to be at the end?” We talk about accomplishments, marriages, children, travel, hobbies, and all sorts of things we want to see and do. We have giggling conversations with girlfriends over glasses of wine about the exotic men we want to experience, the melted cheese-covered pasta that makes us roll our eyes in delight, and our own individual ideas of what success looks like. For some of us, it’s a passport full before it expires or a roster of lovers to put Cassanova to shame. Perhaps it’s a LinkedIn title or a Best-Seller sticker next to our names on a glossy hardcover somewhere. For some of us, it’s a family, a home, and a 63-year marriage. But what happens after all of that? After we stop striving? After we are old enough and successful enough that we finally settle into something that feels like safety? At some point, we stop expecting women to change and instead insist that they, and the lives they have built around us that feel good to slip into now and then like an old, familiar sweater, stay the same.
Then their husbands die. Or their hips break too badly for them to live alone. Or their minds start to wander as their neurons unthread themselves with time. Suddenly Change, with its all-consuming presence, breaks into a woman’s life and leaves them blinking, dazed, and unable to recognize themselves in the mirror.
We don’t talk much about what we want to be when we’ve grown past the bulk of the good stuff, and we are still here, do we?
Our favorite female main characters exist pressed between the pages of a book, or within the few hours they dazzle us on screen. If we’re talking rom-com, you bet your ass there’s a happy ending, and if we’re talking anything else, there’s an ending of some sort. Sometimes, if someone’s written a story very well, you will be left with their taste in your mouth, and you will wonder what became of them. You might imagine a million different places your favorite character might have gone or the million different ways she may have moved through the world, but you don’t have to watch it. You don’t have to endure the drudgery of the days in between the scenes worth penning or the character arcs that feel inspiring. Once the feisty 20-something gets her unlikely man and says, “I do,” we don’t usually want to read page after page of her getting no sleep, changing diapers, feeding babies, being tired, and wondering if things will ever feel different or ever feel the same again. We, and that’s all of us (hi, me), prefer a story with a satisfying ending.
Our lives are too long and complex to be captured neatly in a book. We are too real to turn into two hours of a red-carpet-worthy vignette. Still, we understand ourselves in story. We think of ourselves as characters in the larger narrative of our lives. We are creatures who love to gather around a campfire and spin tales out of imagination and stardust and who learn how the world works by turning those tales into roadmaps. That’s so beautiful, don’t you think? Especially when someone who has been living their life as a side character realizes that they have every right to step into the spotlight as the leading lady. To be a witness as a whole, wild, messy person lets themself be free is one of the most incredible things we can experience.
The girls have caught on to the fact that we get to pen our own tales. Those of us with the courage and circumstances to really start changing things have even found a way to form a temporary truce with Change in service to greater character development as we pursue our FMC life. We ask ourselves a series of questions: What would the bold me do? The loving me? The curious me? What would the me I’d be most proud to root for do at this crossroads? Who would she choose? Where would she go? What can I change to step back into my life as the main character instead of a passive, voiceless girl standing by to spice up someone else’s plot?
My very favorite people on the planet are those who are who they are on purpose. The cultural shift toward encouraging each of us to do just that and claim our Main Character Energy has been a wonderful thing to behold.
And yet, I cannot help but wonder, what happens when the book ends? What happens when we get what we are sure will be our happily ever after, but unlike the main characters we love in books and on screen, we keep on living? Life, if we’re lucky, is so very long. It keeps changing. We keep changing. But we don’t talk about our favorite characters forging more than one happily ever after - having second, third, and fourth stories. We don’t help ourselves, or anyone else, prepare for the way that Change often demands the most of us when we’re least prepared to endure it. When I was a kid, we didn’t talk about where we’d go for Christmas after Grandpa died, and Nana moved away to discover a version of her that was someone entirely new. As an adult, the wave of grief I felt as I said goodbye to the home that had witnessed me grow up in sleepovers and holiday snapshots nearly swept me away.
About six months after Nana moved into the apartment, I asked her what she was most proud of about all the things she’d gone through. She said, without much hesitation at all, that she was proud of how much-unexpected Change she had experienced, survived, and even embraced. Each new lunch companion had an entire life story to discover. Each new day had a chance to try something new. She’d done water aerobics and jewelry-making classes. She’d tried food she never had before. She made friends with new people in her 80s, friends forwho she put in the tender and vulnerable work of planning and investing time without the promise of fulfilling connection. She’d traded dogsitting for Posh for catsitting for Kevin down the hall. She’d learned all the new roads home. But, she said, it was more painful than she ever thought it could be. It wasn’t just the grief of losing her lover, her best friend, and her home (read: her entire sense of security and, in many ways, identity) but the sheer amount of energy and courage it took to make space for anything new. I’m exhausted at 31. I can only imagine what it feels like to be working with eighty-something bones in a world where it feels like you’ve seen it all, hauling yourself out of bed to go try yoga for seniors and an origami class. I can only imagine the great cost of carrying the aching weight of your broken heart to lunch with a woman you hope might be close enough to call a friend someday on the same chronically painful back you’ve been nursing since before your husband never came home. How many more bits of my grandma splintered and cracked under the pressure of that sudden, extraordinary demand because she hadn’t imagined it could be coming? Because she wasn’t prepared when it arrived?
In the last days before her house was sold, I sat with Nana on the living room floor and helped her sort through letters, photos, and cards from a lifetime of loving and being loved to decide which she would take with her into Being Someone New. I fought tears the entire time she wove in and out of the present, dipping her toe in a memory and sighing at the comfort before forcing herself to let it go. When she pulled a letter from her own grandmother out of the pile, her hand leapt to her chest, and her lids shut immediately. Her blue eyes, just like her father’s but unlike any of her sons’ or grandchildren’s, shone like glass as she looked at me and said, “The day of my grandmother’s funeral, I cried and cried. I thought I would die of grief. God, I loved that woman.” I wept, then, too, because it felt like I would be confronting that very same tidal wave of pain so soon as we dwelled in the endings of so many things. It seemed so deeply unfair that she had to do the work of the main character yet again, being thrust into a hero’s journey she didn’t ask for the day her life-partner's brain hemorrhaged, instead of being able to rest peacefully as the person she’d been for so long. It didn’t seem fair that her story was being drug back into print, a sequel to a beloved novel being churned out by force when she’d been ready to leave us all with a predictable happy ending.
But perhaps the truth of being the main character of our own lives is understanding that every main character we’ve ever loved has gone on living without us, spending every day of the rest of their lives with themselves for company, deciding who’d they be without a predictable character arc or an audience to cheer them on. Perhaps we spend our last days with an armful of photos of the grandmother who taught us what it means to love but who is now left with only one person who loves her on Earth. Perhaps Change, and its wrecking-ball nature and horrible, rotten timing, can become the only thing we really feel comfortable expecting. The Main Character in us all understands that life might not always be something we can control, but it can give us a chance to prove that we are who we say we are. If we are The FMC of our world, loveable, goofy, complicated, and real, then we are still those characters when no one is looking. It would be a great disservice to all of us if we don’t expand our conversation about Main Character Energy to make space for what a main character does when she is tired, the story is over, and she is asked to be flexible when life has made her most brittle. Since I turned thirty, I have had to accept that stretching my hip flexors is a necessary part of my daily maintenance and will always be as long as I don’t want them to snap and take my lower back with them. Perhaps we can also accept that the concept of our lives – what about us is permanent and what about us could turn over a million more times – is a muscle we need to intentionally stretch, too.
After all, we all love a Female Main Character who has starred in a dazzling story full of life, love, and loss. And even when it feels like the story is over, we are still those women long after the last word. We are still in the blank end pages, carrying on and embracing the constant reality of inconsistency, being who we are on purpose. If we can begin to be curious about who we are after people stop watching or reading, we can accept that while our lives and bodies, and people and “home” might never stop changing, our Main Character Energy never will.
