When is the end the end?

The death of Polly feels like the end of something that already had ended. We hadn't communicated in decades ... and yet the sixties and seventies were such impotant decades to me and she was so much a part of that, her being alive seemed to fuel something in my memory of those times. Just as the death of one's parents suggests a formal end to childhood, I sense another formal ending now. Maybe it's the fantasy that we might be friends again. Maybe it's the curiosity if she took anything valuable from the relationship as I did. Maybe it's just my growing bewilderment about almost everything. (Everything short of my art.) Well, as Lew Welch has noted ... What an extravagance! What a relief!