We’ve all had phases in our lives that have had to come to an end. That’s how our lives work. We grow, we move on. Besides the lessons I’ve learned in those life phases, the most valuable thing to come out of those endings, are the people I’ve picked up along the way.

Friendship is a bit like fishing. Some people we catch and we keep. Other times, it’s catch and release. When a phase in your life ends, it can mean saying good-bye to some friends and letting them go. This isn’t always easy, but usually in hindsight, we can see it was appropriate. The ones that are special, though, the keepers, are the ones you end up taking home, cleaning, filleting and eating or putting in the freezer. What?

Perhaps I took the fishing metaphor a little too far there, but you get the idea. Some friends stay fresh, with you throughout your different phases, regardless of the ending or the new beginning.  Some may get frozen for a time, but you can always count on them to thaw out and still be delicious. Too far again?

How do you know which friends are the keepers? Sometimes you don’t have a choice. Sometimes when a phase of your life ends, so does that friendship. It can end because you’ve moved on, or they have. It can end simply because interests have now changed or you don’t mean as much to them anymore once you’ve moved on. In that case, a release of that friendship is best for everyone.

Those who end up as keepers are the ones who stick with you through the endings and cheer you on to new beginnings. It’s a filtering process, perhaps nature’s way of letting only the best survive in your life. The ones you know you can keep, cook and eat, or, not. Whichever. One things is for sure, you will value their friendship all the more. Endings happen to keep us moving. One thing ends and we move on to the next, sometimes whether we want to or not. In the Return of the King, Frodo said, “I’m glad to be with you, Samwise Gamgee, here at the end of all things.” I am glad for endings. I am glad to have had the many different phases in my life and the friends I’ve caught along the way. To all of my keepers, I thank you. I will be glad to be with you, at the end of all things.

Sandra Wickham lives in Vancouver, Canada with her husband and toddler son. Her friends call her a needle crafting aficionado, health guru and ninja-in-training. Sandra’s short stories have appeared in Sirens, Equus, The Urban Green Man, Evolve, Vampires of the New Undead, Crossed Genres magazine, Luna Station Quarterly and more. She slush reads for Lightspeed Magazine and promotes the Creative Ink Festival for writers and readers. 

A beginning is an ending, always.

That quote is from the short story Satan’s Children, by Spider Robinson.  It is, in fact, the very first line, and possibly the best first line ever written.  I mention this because I got to tell Spider that, the very first time we met, and that was the beginning of a thirty-year (so far) friendship. 

I love that line, not just for its elegance, but for the sheer truth of it. The thing is, there’s often a transition period between the two states when pain makes it hard to tell much of anything. Birth and death both hurt like hell.

So.  Beginnings, and endings.

Two and a half years or so ago, my marriage ended.  Nobody cheated, there was no abuse of any kind–it mostly had to do with my fibromyalgia getting worse, and making me hard to live with as a result.  There was other stuff–there always is–but ultimately the bond between us just wasn’t strong enough to take the strain of the forces pulling us apart.  The marriage came to an end, as they sometimes do.

I’ve had relationships end before.  This was different.  We’d been together longer than either of us had previously experienced.  We had a home.  We had a child.  We had a life.

And it ended–except it didn’t. 

If I could have just walked away and started over, I could have handled it.  But you don’t walk away from being a parent, not ever. And my love for my son is bigger than anything, including my own pain.

So I didn’t get a clean ending.  I got a long, protracted, messy one.  She kept the house.  I got memories that ambushed me every time I went there to pick my son up or drop him off.  I couldn’t walk down the street where I’d lived, or talk to the neighbours I’d come to know, or visit the restaurant we used to eat in–not without an overwhelming sense of loss.  I was trapped in that feeling–an ending that never ended.  An amputation is far preferable to slowly having a limb ripped off. 

But at the same time I was experiencing that constant ending, I was also beginning.

I’ve been a novelist for most of my life–and while I’ve never gotten rich, I’ve had a decent career.  Twenty-four published novels over thirty years, a few short stories, essays and plays, a brief stint as a magazine columnist. 

But here’s the thing: did you know Babe Ruth–one of the greatest sluggers in baseball history– wanted to be a pitcher?

I’m no Babe Ruth.  But even though I’ve done fairly well as a paperback writer, there’s something else I’ve always wanted to do: comics.  Even managed to sell a few scripts to Marvel back in the nineties, just before the big crash in the comics market.  The line I was writing for–a cyberpunk version of superheroes–died.  I still got paid, but my work never saw print. 

I tried to break back into the market for years, but never managed it.  I eventually gave up, realizing that the comics world was too competitive, too corporate, and too cliquey for me.  I made my peace with it.

But I still wanted to make comics.

Interesting thing about fibromyalgia: one of the symptoms is called “fibro fog”, and it basically destroys your ability to concentrate.  When this happened to me, I couldn’t write.  For my entire career, I’d prided myself on never missing a deadline; I used to be able to write a 100,000 word book in four months and I was never late. 

That streak ended when my fibro worsened.  My last book was months overdue, and I was forced to stop work on the one after that only a few chapters in. 

But I’d come up with an idea a few years before, one I’d never had time to work on before.  While constantly exhausted and spending most of my time in bed, I discovered that I still had enough brain-power left to surf the web and do some research.  Maybe I couldn’t string words together into coherent sentences anymore, but my imagination still worked. 

And slowly, over many months, I figured out how I could make a webcomic.  While large parts of my life were about to end, here was a beginning.

To make a comic, you need to have someone to write it and someone to draw it.  These can be the same person, but I have zero drawing ability.  I had to rely on collaborating with other artists, and that was one of the bottlenecks that make breaking into comics really difficult.  You have to find someone willing to work with you with zero money upfront, on projects that will require a sizeable time commitment on their part–art takes a long time to do and a huge amount of work.  Plus, you have to find someone whose stuff meets the standards of high-quality work already being published, but who hasn’t broken in yet themselves–because as soon as they do, they’re swamped with paying work and you no longer have a collaborator.  A tricky needle to thread.

So I made myself into something new:  an artist.   

Technology made it all possible.  Apps that adapt pictures into comic-book format.  Filters that transform photos into art.  And a wealth of public-domain online imagery, from Creative Commons photos to museum, art gallery and library archives all over the world that made their content freely available to anyone to use, alter, or sell. 

I’m more of a DJ than a musician, but I’m okay with that.  And I discovered that manipulating images uses a different part of my brain, one that requires less focus and more repetitive tasking.  It’s still time-consuming, but far less so than drawing would be.

And it’s all under my control.  Which, when you find yourself trapped in a situation that makes you feel powerless, is a life-saver.

My webcomic is called THE CROSSOVER.  It’s set in a multiversal bar where fugitives, mercenaries, smugglers and thieves meet on neutral ground to make deals.  My heroine is a version of Alice, one who grew up to become a universe-hopping sorceress who specializes in stealing artificts–items from alternate fictional realities. 

Almost anyone, from any universe, can show up in the Crossover bar.  I’m using not just public domain art, but images of cool stuff other artists have made–stuffies, jewelry, costumes–and putting up links to their pages below the comic panel so I can promote their creations at the same time.  All done with their permission, of course, and they retain all rights.  If you’ve got something neat you’d like to show off, let me take a pic of it and stick it in my comic.  Heck, you can even have one of your characters drop by for a drink.  And if you’re a Spider Robinson fan–like me!–I have it on good authority that a certain Mike Callahan sometimes tends bar there, as a favor to an old friend.

Oh, and Spider’s story Satan’s Children also gets my vote for best final line, too:

An ending is a beginning, always.

DD writes under four different pseudonyms. As Don DeBrandt he’s written several science fictions novels (THE QUICKSILVER SCREEN, STEELDRIVER, TIMBERJAK, V.I.,) numerous pop-culture essays for Smartpop Books, and the Buffyverse media tie-in SHAKEDOWN (an ANGEL novel).

As Donn Cortez he’s written five CSI: Miami novels, two CSI: Vegas novels, a murder mystery set at Burning Man (THE MAN BURNS TONIGHT) and a thriller (THE CLOSER) which became a bestseller in Germany. (The sequel, REMOTE, is available as an e-book in English).

As DD Barant he’s best known for his Bloodhound Files series: DYING BITES, DEATH BLOWS, KILLING ROCKS, BETTER OFF UNDEAD, BACK FROM THE UNDEAD and UNDEAD TO THE WORLD. As Dixie Lyle, he’s written the Whiskey, Tango and Foxtrot Mysteries: TO DIE FUR, A TASTE FUR MURDER, MARKED FUR MURDER and A DEADLY TAIL.

You can learn more about DD and his art at his comic series The Crossover, on his website DDBarant.com, on Twitter, and on The Officialicious DDBarant Facebook Page.

I remember exactly where I was when I got the news my older brother Doug had died. It was the Monday of Labor Day weekend, 2011. I was at my home, a 28-acre forested property in Mulmur Township, southeast of Collingwood.

The telephone rang, and I answered. It was my eldest brother Peter calling to tell me Doug had passed away earlier that morning.

The news both did, and did not, come as a shock. After having a stroke-like memory loss one August day in 2010, Doug spent some time in the hospital before being diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer. Chemotherapy beat back the disease for a bit, but his health began to decline again, leading ultimately to a stay in a hospice before the day of the fateful call.

So the call was not unexpected—and yet, the final confirmation of what we dread is always, in its own way, an unwelcome sort of thing.

What made Doug’s death sting all the more was his age—he was only 58, and that seemed much too young.

Doug was six years older than me. Losing him really made me think about my health and my future, and became one of the motivators—although not the only one—that drove me, three years later, to take early retirement at age 55.

Doug, on the other hand, had opted to continue working, although he too could have taken early retirement, albeit with a reduced pension. As his health declined, I fretted that he’d made the wrong decision. Doug owned a large rural property, and had harboured thoughts of spending his retirement days puttering around doing this and that. It struck me as unfair that he never got the chance.

I remembered so many family Christmas get-togethers where he’d either been absent, or been there on loan, his pager clipped to his waistband as though he were some sort of corporate gun-slinger ready to take on trouble at the drop of a hat. He worked too hard, I told myself. He never got the chance to really enjoy life.

A heart-warming number of Doug’s friends, fellow nature enthusiasts, former fastball teammates, and co-workers showed up to the visitation, the memorial service, and the Celebration of Life afterward in the local Legion hall. As they made my way to the line in the visitation, or stopped and chatted with me in the quiet confines of the Legion hall, the attendees offered condolences and often, a shared story or two. It was the anecdotes, particularly those shared by co-workers, that lifted my spirits a little.

The stories shared by his co-workers clearly illustrated that Doug was one of those fortunate people who truly loved his job. They spoke affectionately of him as their “big brain”, the quintessential problem solver. They shared stories of his mentorship, his dedication to the job, and his forthright but fair way of dealing with people at all levels in the organization. They talked about the enjoyment he got from wrestling a thorny problem to the ground.

Some of the anecdotes were simple, some almost trivial—yet individually and as a whole they provided comfort. The respect and affection with which Doug’s co-workers spoke of my brother told me that he’d had a second “family” away from home—one that had cared deeply for him, and looked out after his interests.

It seems such a small gesture on their part, to come to a visitation and memorial service and exchange words with the family, yet these insights were inestimably valuable to me. Those comments and shared stories proved to be an unexpected gift that moved me closer to accepting my brother’s fate, bridging a gap I likely wouldn’t have been able to span on my own.

I got to thinking that maybe, in his own way, Doug would have preferred to go out at the top of his game, rather than fading off into the sunset. Perhaps retiring would have left a void in his life—who was I to say? Either way, I now realized I had neither the right nor the responsibility to pass judgement on his choices. Finally, I found myself able to let go of the bitterness I’d felt on his behalf.

It’s been just over seven years since Doug passed away, yet I still find myself thinking of him often. I miss his quirky sense of humour, his ability to reel off abstract facts, and the deep enthusiasm he radiated when talking about his favorite pastimes and interests.

And yet, I also realize that he lived life on his own terms. Sure, he never got to retire. But he worked at a challenging job that he deeply enjoyed, and in that much, he was a lucky guy.

Lisa Timpf is a retired HR and communications professional who lives in Simcoe, Ontario. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues, including four Chicken Soup for the Soul anthologies, Small Farm Canada, Star*Line, Dogs of War, and The Future Fire. She has self-published a collection of creative non-fiction and poetry entitled A Trail that Twines: Reflections on Life and Nature, and also wrote St. George’s Lawn Tennis Club: The First Hundred Years, the history of a tennis club in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia

You can learn more about Lisa at her blog The Writing Journey, on Amazon, or Goodreads.