A simple lesson in punctuation

When one chapter of your life ends, there is always some sort of punctuation.

For the simple, quiet chapters, there are periods. These are the times in your life that you finally finished third grade after moving to a new school, when you landed your first job at a movie theater, or the time you joined the lacrosse team and played mediocre defense for four seasons.

Having a chapter end with a period is normal, it's expected. They get the job done, let you know that things are over and signify that you can stop reading and move on. It completes the story, and wraps it up in a nice, legible package that makes your life easy to read. These chapters have a proper ending, have a certain feeling attached to them that says there is nothing left to wonder about.

There is closure.

A chapter ending with an exclamation point happens sometimes, although they are far less common than those with a period. These are the chapters of your life that were hectic, the ones you never thought would end or the ones you hoped would never end. These are for when you were running around frantic, either at a karaoke party in your dorm room freshman year or when you had to sprint across the front lawn of your high school so you wouldn't miss the AP English test.

This is for when you witnessed the death of your grandfather or for the time you appeared live on ESPN for doing something stupid. These are the chapters that you will probably not forget, if only because of the sheer force behind the punctuation at the end and the huge impact they had on your life. These are the chapters that people will read and think to themselves, "hmm, that was pretty neat."

As memorable as these chapters may be in the long run, there is still closure. They are finished.

Then there are the ellipses and question marks. These are the chapters that have no end, the ones that linger in your mind for years. This could be for the time you wondered what would have happened if you had left a play early with your girlfriend instead of meeting up with some other friends at a fast food place, the time you decided to move and go to college two states away from everyone you ever knew, or the time you packed your life into the back of a Jeep and left the best job you ever had to pursue a career in writing.

All of this is left up to the imagination, because instead of one stoic dot, there are three fascinating ones - three dots tempting you to question what happened, wonder what the ending would have been, and fight an endless battle to figure out how the chapter could have ended.

Those are the hardest to read, and the hardest to deal with. When you spend an hour, two hours, or even a full day thinking about the chapter of your life that has no real ending, it starts to wear on you. It takes its toll. The words bleed together and the lines between reality and imagination swirl into one large mess of words, images, and emotions.

When your chapter has no ending, you are stuck in limbo.

No matter how your story reads, no matter what outcome you wanted, you can never go back and change what has already been printed.

The best you can do is put a number by the sentence and create an index in the back.

What I'm trying to say is that if your chapter doesn't have an ending, you can probably find one in somebody else's story, even if it's not the ending you had scripted.

Sometimes these endings are difficult and depressing, endings that you would rather cut out and leave on the editing room floor. Sometimes the endings are joyful and amazing, endings you want to photocopy and tape to your office door.

But having an ending, having something to look back on good or bad, is better than having no ending at all.

For all that has been written and all that's been printed about the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the one thing that hasn't been discussed is an ending, because there isn't one in sight.

Seeing so many people, so many Americans, left in a complete state of flux trivializes your stories a bit, makes your chapter seem a little less significant, if only because it has an ending.

Theirs doesn't.

At least not yet.

The best we can do is keep reading, keep hoping and keep praying.

John VanVleet is a writer and columnist for the Hungry Horse News. You can reach him directly at jvanvleet@hungryhorsenews.com