A middle-aged man walks into a diner.
He sits down in a booth facing the front door and thumbs through the tableside jukebox selections.
Each time he hears the door open, the man looks up to assess who it is. Then he returns to the jukebox menu.
Eventually, he makes his selection, and Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ starts blasting through the diner’s sound system. The man then turns his attention toward the diner menu.
Soon, the man’s wife arrives, followed by his son. As they wait for his daughter to appear, they make small talk. All as a strange man sits nearby at the counter, discreetly watching.
The daughter struggles to parallel park her car in a space across the street, prolonging her family’s small talk. Meanwhile, the strange man gets up from his counter seat and heads to the diner’s restroom.
The daughter finally parks and hustles toward the diner’s front door. As it opens, her father looks up and…
Everything cuts to black.
This diner scene represented the final moments of the hit TV show The Sopranos.
The mob drama had been a massive hit during the 2000s, as audiences followed the life of the main character Tony Soprano.
Tony was in some danger during the last season of the show. That’s why he was watching the diner door so intently during that final scene. And that’s also why the audience felt the tension as the man by the diner counter lay in wait.
But with the scene ending as it did, that tension remained indefinitely. Even now, nearly two decades after the final episode aired, Tony Soprano’s fate is uncertain.
And this caused the audience great distress.
I only watched one episode of The Sopranos during its run – one from an earlier season. But the uproar over the series finale was so intense that even I knew about the abrupt cut to black.
There were news stories on the ending. There were ample talk show segments delving into it. There were theories about what happened to Tony proliferating on blogs and fan websites.
It was a circus.
The screenwriters of The Sorpanos had seemingly caused a great disservice by refusing to add a period to the show’s final sentence.
But had they really?
It’s time to get your coat.
My mother’s words dented my spirits.
It was Thanksgiving, and I was having a blast hanging out with my cousins. I wasn’t ready to leave, and I told my mother as much.
Don’t worry, my mother replied. We’re not leaving just yet. It will take some time to say goodbye to everyone.
You see, my parents had a protocol. Whenever we went to a family function, we made sure to work the room. Each person we encountered got their own unique greeting and farewell.
This protocol was far from unique. But it was time-intensive. Even if those greetings and farewells took a minute apiece, they likely constituted an hour of the total time spent at a function.
The parting portion of this ritual has gained several names. The long goodbye. The Italian goodbye. The Jewish goodbye. The Cuban goodbye. The Southern goodbye.
And I was a fan of it. At least at first.
For this extended goodbye ritual allowed me to wind down my social activity. The scene could come to a more natural conclusion than an abrupt fade to black. I could slowly move from the excitement of a family gathering to the solitude of home.
As a shy and quiet kid, I needed that.
But as I grew up, I started to detest the whole protocol. It felt like I was on one of those flights that never got to cruising altitude. My family was spending more time with hellos and goodbyes than with actual discourse.
Despite my displeasure with this pattern, I perpetuated it in my early adult life. When attending social functions with my friends, I would work the room vigorously upon arrival and departure. It was the polite thing to do, even if it wore me down and led me to come home later than I intended.
While making the farewell rounds at one of these functions, I failed to locate one of my friends. Panicked, I circled the room again until another friend intercepted me.
Don’t keep searching for him, the friend quipped. He Irish Goodbyed it.
I somehow had never heard the term Irish Goodbye before this. I thought it was just another variation of the long goodbye.
But this friend explained that it was quite the opposite. An Irish Goodbye meant departing without a word, disappearing without a trace.
The introvert in me found this all quite appealing. And I started employing the Irish Goodbye myself from time to time. It felt freeing and strangely practical. And it didn’t lead to the ostracization I feared.
This experience brought me back to The Sopranos, and that fateful final episode.
Maybe the screenwriters were onto something after all.
In these modern, turbulent times, we seem to have little in common.
But one attribute we do share is a love of stories.
Storytelling has a distinct hold on our psyche, capturing our attention and influencing our behavior. As a writer, I recognize this all too well.
But storytelling is not without its boundaries.
We expect stories to have a certain structure. Whether we support Kurt Vonnegut’s Shape of Stories theorem or Joseph Campbell’s depiction of The Hero’s Journey, we demand a rhythm to the tales we encounter and the ones we tell. And above all else, we yearn for a definitive resolution.
The abrupt cut to black in The Sopranos and the Irish Goodbye — each violates this implied promise. They leave the stories we’ve just experienced as a scattered mess, rather than a tidy package. They require us to use our imagination to tidy things up. And they delay our ability to digest all that we’ve encountered.
This is more than a shock to the system. It’s a repudiation of an ideal.
And yet, it’s likely a more accurate depiction of finality than the version we yearn for.
Yes, abrupt endings dot the landscapes of our lives. Anything from injury to job loss to natural disaster can impact us – or those we know – without warning.
When they do, carefully crafted exit plans go up in smoke. And we’re left to pick up the pieces.
Given our story structure preferences, we’re all too likely to relitigate the terminal event. But the more energy we spend on how it ended, the less we have left for what we do next.
This is the problem with the long goodbye. What might seem like good manners can turn into a debilitating vice, paralyzing us in place when the story we live doesn’t fit the mold we built for it.
It’s far better to lean into the discomfort every now and then. To appreciate the unconventional ending to one of TV’s legendary shows. To walk out the door without making a sound.
It prepares us to face the world as it is, rather than quibbling over how it should have been.
The shadow of the long goodbye is formidable. But it needn’t be all-powerful.
Let’s take some control back.