Season Endings & Series Finales

Rewatching Gilmore Girls, Returning to old beginnings

The night before I left Chicago, I stood on a rooftop in Lincoln Park and looked out over the city. I recognized it in every direction. That unmistakable skyline, the rippled mirror of the lake, the bright lights of Wrigley beaming a strange cloud of white on the otherwise darkening sky. Postcard pictures of a beloved city. My city.

A handful of friends had gathered to send me off- one last goodbye. The sun was setting and the light was golden. Or maybe time has just tinted the memory with a honey colored sweetness- the kind of warmth cast by fondness, softened by distance and the near-sightedness of my recall.

Standing there, I felt placed in my life. Planted so squarely inside a moment that it began to expand, arms open wide to gather the past and the future, holding the accumulation. Time slowed and I could see everything. What led me here and where it would lead me next.

There is a scene in the last episode of Gilmore Girls where Lorelai is standing with her parents at the edge of the party the town has thrown for Rory before she leaves. Richard, Lorelai’s dad, marvels at the scale of it, the magnitude of an entire town gathered at a moment’s notice under a makeshift tent, in the rain; not just to say goodbye to his granddaughter, but to celebrate his daughter. 

”This is a testament to you, Lorelai,” he said, “to the life you’ve built here. It takes a remarkable person to inspire all this.”

I have folded those words up like a letter that was written for me. I have pinned them to this moment, laid the track down underneath, so it narrates as I looked around at the summary of my own life- the familiar backdrop, the city where I made a home, the friends who had become my family.

It reads like a love letter to the younger me who, six years earlier, stood on a rooftop just a few blocks away, alone in a city that was a complete stranger, even though it didn’t feel like one. It underscores that moment, too- her looking out at the same sky, the same cut-out edges of the same buildings, the pale stars, the bright windows, wishing for exactly this.

I was choosing to leave, but in so many ways that are hard to explain, it felt like being ripped away. I knew it was time, but I would never be ready. Like Rory, I was following the promise of a career, spring boarding from the support and shoulders of the cast of characters who had loved me to this point. The only comfort came from remembering what was ahead, not thinking about what was being left behind.  

That night, we cheered and laughed and reminisced. Old jokes, worn references, short hand conversations we were always in the middle of. We didn’t stay too late. We were all still a little hung over from my farewell party the night before. From an entire summer of farewell parties. Nights spent drinking every last drop from the glass. It had been a long goodbye, one that befits the end of something epic. But it had to end sometime.

I’ve had this feeling lately- this longing, tugging at my sleeve for attention. Insistent, but also inarticulate. Inaccessible. An emotion you recognize spoken in a language you don’t understand. I thought maybe I’d find the translation in Stars Hollow. The way an ache inside you can correspond to the latitude and longitude¹ of a fictional landscape. That last episode had been on my mind. It felt like a good place to start. 

Within minutes, like magic, there they were. Perfectly preserved. Rory about to live out the dream she’d been working for her whole life. Lorelai watching her past and future gather under a canopy stitched together with the kind of love she’d been looking for. 

They were right where I’d left them. And because shows are time machines and because our finales corresponded so closely and because, in many ways, that show itself represented what I believed was next for me, I was there too. All of us perched at the edge of a possibility that felt known. Certain, even.  

That was it. The feeling.

I am homesick for a life I never had. 

When my move to LA wasn’t what it was supposed to be, when nothing worked the way I thought it would, a part of me became suspended, frozen in my potential. And, without realizing it, I keep trying to get back to the point where it all went wrong. Or, at least, the last place where it was going right. As if that is the truth and everything else has been a deviation. Some kind of mistake. 

I was extremely excited about the Gilmore Girls reboot. And then extremely disappointed when I watched it. I don’t even like to acknowledge its existence. I refuse to believe that’s where they’d be. Who they’d be. I prefer, instead, to imagine them ten years before, following that scripted, happily-ever-after trajectory.

I realize now, I have been treating the inconvenient storylines of my life the same way. Ignoring them. Pretending like I can make a few u-turns that will put me back on track, as if those detours never happened. Expectations like an account I’ve never reconciled.

I’ve been living in a deficit against a balance that’s long since been spent.

Maybe the trouble with A Year In The Life, and with how I’ve looked at my life over the years, is you can’t just pick up where you left off ten years later. Because we’re different now. You can’t skip the middle. That’s the part that changed us.

Last month was my 15 year anniversary of living in LA. The date came and went, unnoticed. I didn’t even think about it until just now. I was the same age as Rory when I left Chicago. I am the same age now that Lorelai was back then.²

A full-circle moment.

Closure, but not completion.

Maybe it’s the way Julia Cameron described it in The Artist’s Way- life as a spiral. We are always circling back to the same territory, just from a different vantage point. A little higher up each time. First, a rooftop. Then, a mountain. A familiar outlook, a broader horizon.

I think I’ve looked at some of my endings with the finality of finales. Nowhere to go but back to the beginning. But our lives are not a series of self contained stories, are they? They are chapters, each one a continuation. Even the endings are carried forward. The transition of a season.

Starting over isn’t the same as going back.

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1. Or should I say longing-gitude

2. Before you pull out your calculator, the math is not perfectly exact but it’s pretty close (which I think is pretty cool) and you get the point…