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293 Lifespans One puzzler’s epitaph could be a jigsaw puzzle of Alaska left unfinished on a kitchen table. Another’s might be purple ballerina slippers worn just once. Finality makes no allowances. Expected or not, it’s always a shock. Without a modicum of tact or thoughtfulness, it blunders in to silence friendships or affairs of state, disrupt religious rituals, or sunder lovers in the act itself. The more it makes no sense, the more it makes more sense in retrospect than we imagined possible. Mozart’s “Unfinished Symphony” profits from being incomplete the way assassinated Presidents accrue more aura than the spared. How else can we explain why permanence becomes impermanent while transience lasts forever? Who understands the irony of endings? Whatever happens contradicts what we anticipate, and every day is like a poem written 294 line by consequential line until. . . . ...

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