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I remember how I was reading “A Captain at Fifteen” when I was little and how I cried in that one scene when I thought the main character died, and when I later shared it with my friend she laughed at me and said: “But there was so much of the book left! Main characters don’t die in the middle of the book.” It’s been around 20 years since that conversation, but I still remember it. It never hit me until then that the main characters don’t die in the middle of the book. And I remember that conversation very often these days.
Sometimes (every day really) I see an obituary and I read the person’s story, and it feels very wrong because the main character of the story just died like that in the middle of everything. I just want to protest: “No, this is wrong, he can’t die just yet. Rewrite that. His daughter just started to learn to walk || She has just opened a new start-up || They got just married two days ago || This child was just born and hasn’t even seen the world outside the hospital || He was such an amazing activist and was supposed to become our future president || We just closed the fundraiser for a new car for this entire division yesterday…” But they’re just… dead. Like that. In the middle of the story. No closure, no logical conclusion to their chapter. Just a sudden stop. And you sit there numb, just wishing to rewrite that, to post a scathing review for that plot hole, to trash talk the author. But all you have is this feeling of wrongness: what’s the point of all these pages ahead, how are we to finish the story without them?..
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