All stories have a beginning, middle and end, including the stories of our lives. Over the summer, my wife and I found ourselves dealing with an extraordinary number of endings – the sudden loss of good friends, former colleagues, famous people we enjoyed and admired, even a beloved pet.

It was literally as if death were in the air. At our ages, this shouldn’t have been terribly surprising, but the reality of the sudden non-existence of so many people (and my cat) we knew well and cared deeply about was startling and a bit stunning. A cold splash of grief and sadness amid our warmest and normally happiest season. Like the unexpected shock of stepping into a frigid ocean on a hot August day, then pummeled by wave after wave of freezing water.

The list of losses was long. It began with a tragic accident. A longtime friend and former colleague was killed cutting a tree limb while standing on a step ladder. We stood in line for two hours at the funeral home to share our sympathy with his family, so great was the community turnout. I lost another colleague – one of my best bosses, and later a good friend and mentor – just a couple of months later. I simply could not imagine the world without this person, so big was his personality and his heart.

Then the celebrity deaths started to pile up. First Robin Williams, who almost cost me my first journalism job when I sneaked out of a boring town council meeting I was covering as a cub newspaper reporter to rush home to watch this crazy new TV show called “Mork and Mindy.”

Joan Rivers followed shortly. She used to headline in my hometown of Las Vegas, and my wife – otherwise a card-carrying intellectual – loved watching her as the trash-talking host of Fashion Police.

And shockingly, the nightmarish beheadings of two journalists by ISIS radicals.

Then, my beautiful female Maine Coon cat stopped eating, a victim of old age and a failing liver. This was a cat that waited for me to come to bed every night so she could climb on my chest and frustrate my attempt to read myself to sleep. I don’t know what it says about me or our relationships to our pets, but I choked up more when the vet put her down then when confronted with the deaths of my fellow humans.

As I write this, another dear friend – a retired mapmaker and Irish wit – has been transferred from the hospital to a palliative care unit, where he will likely spend his last days.

Very few real-life stories have happy endings. The last line of John Irving’s novel “The World According to Garp” observes that “we are all terminal cases.” In literature there’s a reader’s and storyteller’s satisfaction to a conclusive ending, the closing of the circle. But even real-life endings give us a sense of completion and closure. Even the saddest ones.

— Special to the Telegram