I got briefly sucked into Instagram this week. I rejoined it because so many people use it as their free website and without the app I couldn’t look up, say, handymen or the thrift shop I like to go to, the one that’s too far away to go if it’s not open.

Instagram’s algorithm decided that I should be served snippets of movies and series. Legally Blonde was one of them, and Ted Lasso, both worthy of my attention, but also it showed me bits of some truly dreadful movies I will never, ever watch. Instagram knew it could catch my attention with, say, a 14-year-old reprobate being rescued from a life of crime by an unpleasant man, a secret billionaire and her son being harassed by a group of PTA moms, or a creepy guy announcing that his nifty new gun was meant for killing a politician. At least those are the ones I can recall (they were eminently forgettable once I looked away).

The stories were all gripping, I remember that, even most of them were remarkably poor (I watched the PTA-mom one wondering if it was AI, because it was so badly written and acted). What they had in common, as in all stories, is the knowledge that in spite of how awful things get, there will be some kind of realization, redemption, or resolution, when everything will fall into place. Then the story will end.

The story, I can tell you, does not actually end in real life. Not even when someone dies. It just keeps going, one ending after another, over and over.

That, of course, is common knowledge, and my own experience, but it doesn’t keep me from periodically thinking that I have finally wrapped things up and can rest.

I have spent a lot of my life suspended in story. Sometimes the story was a tragedy, with a sad ending, and sometimes it was a comedy, but always, I was working toward the end, when everything would be revealed and all the loose ends woven invisibly into the fabric. There were lots of ends, some of them happy, some sad, most of them just complicated. Unfortunately, then I had to keep going.

For instance, my wedding was an end; there was a part of me that truly believed if I could pull off our very cheap wedding, we would be happy forever after, and by god I pulled off that wedding. It was marvelous. I got a lovely wedding gown with a train on drastic sale for $90, made my sister’s maid of honor gown, got my father to come back from Colombia to give me away, went through a perfect ceremony in the tiny church, had glorious weather for the reception at my grandmother’s house, and went off to New York for the two nights that was all we could afford. The whole thing cost me $1,000 in 1976, which was drastically cheap even then, and I have photos.

Then I got to New York, and it was very nice, but it wasn’t the end of any damn story. It was the beginning of figuring out how to be married.

Everything in my life has been like that. If I could lose weight and run a marathon, if I could move to Philadelphia, if I could have a child, if I could go to graduate school, if I could move to the suburbs, if I could get a good job, publish my book, find friends, last through my mother’s long and sad decline while neither destroying myself or failing in my responsibility to her, if I could move to Philadelphia again, and could retire with decent savings and low debt, the story would wrap up neatly.

I’m determined and have good habits, so I eventually did everything on the list, but then, always, every time, the story didn’t end, and I had to keep going, damn it.

Apparently some part of my brain was also keeping track of the marriage story all the while, and when my husband finally (predictably) fell ill with a terminal disease he actually could have avoided if he had just been able to bring himself to take proper care of himself a lot earlier, I finally knew how that story was going to end: with me, once again, being a good caregiver while industriously trying to keep myself from falling to bits, and then, in a nice tidy resolution, finally getting my life back and being free to do what I wanted. I loved the silly son of a bitch, but he was a pain in the ass and all things considered, I had been living with someone else for a long time, and I’m an introvert. It would be nice not to be married any more, honestly.

Then he died. I was furious with him for doing that, let me tell you, which I didn’t exactly expect.

Then I dutifully did all the right things: used the grief counselor that hospice provided, had a graveside funeral for a few close friends, helped my adult child to organize a really nice memorial picnic, got rid of most of his worldly goods and a hell of a lot of mine, took some nice trips, bought myself some good things, developed some constructive routines, took classes, and volunteered. Yet, apparently, my relentless and idiotic brain decided that now I had well and truly ended the story, and now I was just going to take up space until I got old and died.

I regret to inform you that this belief persisted for some time. It has been almost four years since he passed away, and over and over, I kept lapsing into end-of-story mode.

Oh, as always, I went on being constructive and taking care of business. But somehow, I was stuck in the end of the story, reliving the conclusion, and let me tell you, my husband’s end was a highly unsatisfactory conclusion to a 46-year marriage even if it ticked all the boxes.

I kept feeling as if now, since we had wrapped up the story, I was marking time until I had my own unsatisfactory demise.There’s a paragraph or two at the end of that story, which says I went on mourning his death until I was laid to rest in my turn.

For nearly four years, I have been visiting his grave once a month, leaving flowers, and catching him up on the news. If this was a story, I would keep doing it. Hell, a mutual friend visited his grave a couple of weeks ago. She too has been missing him; they were close. She too, like me, has been stuck in repeat the last few years, for good reasons of her own, and only this past week does she seem to be coming out of it. A lot of people loved my husband.

But it’s not a damn story, and I don’t have to keep it going.

At some point yesterday, as I whiled away the time looking at social media, doing housework, watching baseball, running errands, and waiting for a delivery, I thought vaguely about visiting his grave and I realized (a) he’s dead (b) he’s not there (c) I don’t have any particular reason to go visit, because see (a) and (b), plus (d) it takes me an hour by bus to get there and I’m not getting any younger. Also, I should really get off social media entirely, and I should join a gym again because I’m really out of shape despite lots of walking and my regular nightly exercises.

I have money, after all, because even though I was poor most of our married life, I made a lot of tiresomely good decisions. I can afford a gym.

I suspect meeting with my financial advisor a couple of days ago was the triggering event this time, I don’t know why. It wasn’t a particularly significant meeting. Maybe it was just the realization, once again, that I could die next year or twenty years from now, and that I cannot just sit around waiting for the concluding paragraph.

It’s the once again that gets me. Like the Instagram reels, the story wraps up triumphantly, and then life presents you with yet another terribly-acted mini-story. The kidnapped child gets rescued, the awkward student is recognized as a genius, the billionaire finds love with the poverty-stricken mother, the bullies are humiliated, the thief turns out to be rescuing his unjustly-accused brother, the villain is hunted down, and the grieving widow stands at the grave crying and trying to figure out what the hell she is supposed to do now, and then you flick your finger on the screen and another story starts. This shit is relentless.

In a couple of days, I will wrap up the self-imposed task of writing a blog post every day for a year. Then I will probably download and archive the whole thing (I’ve done that before, several times, in many years of keeping various blogs) and probably delete it all and move on, because there’s no particular happy (or sad) ending, there’s just the next thing.

I might go visit his grave on the anniversary of his death, because it’s a pretty cemetery and the weather will be more tolerable then.

But even though it’s a relief to realize that my husband is dead and I can go on, it’s not a damn story and this isn’t the conclusion. It’s just life. I don’t have a redemption arc to offer, or a satisfactory revelation of some transcendent meaning. I’ve written my daily blog post, so now I just have to find a cheap gym, pay my bills, and scrape the cat litter. Probably not in that order. And stay off Instagram, while I’m at it. I lost nearly an hour on the bus yesterday to Instagram, when I could have been watching the weird and wonderful passengers and enjoying the view.