The Last Page
The Music We Are
The last page was written long before the ending.
We completed the prologue and the first two chapters. Even those were a struggle for him; he was already ill.
Together, we listened to Adagio for Strings, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. It was an elegy, a reverence, dissolving all immediacy and significance in the pages before us. In the music’s pathos, gracefully building to the crescendo that only Bernstein could evoke—the bows across the strings—a pitch piercing the heavens, lingering a moment longer, higher—that ached with an unknown love, an ecstasy, a desire to brush God’s hand.
The first line flowed from Finn’s pen like a calm stream over smooth stone:
There is a sound the soul remembers even before it’s born.
He didn’t stop writing until he did. He was too fevered to realize he had written the epilogue to A Man Called River.
He thought it was a reposo—rest—a page that sits within the manuscript for the reader to breathe. No, this is the Epilogue, Finn. He whispered while reading it to himself, reassessing each word and line—the rhythm, a pause, its heartbeat. He did not change a comma.
Ah, it is light, yes? Light in my rough notations for the music River is, the music we all are.
When A Man Called River was published in these pages in September, there was an overwhelming response—until The Last Scroll, that final page of the parable. Scarcely any read it. It was confirmed by Substack that fewer than half the emails were sent.
What I offer today are those rough notations of what Finn called the music we are. Because one evening, violins, cellos, and Lenny showed us six seconds of eternity.
There is a sound the soul remembers
even before it’s born.
It does not rise. It does not fall.
It holds — like dusk holds the edges of day.
Like River holds silence
not as absence
but as vow.
This is the music
that grief hums to joy
when no one is watching.
It is the hymn
carried by those who do not preach,
but walk.
He does not speak the way others do.
He listens the way mountains pray.
And when the string breaks —
he tunes the ache.
Let this be the scroll
that never teaches.
Let it simply
remember you.
He walks without hurry.
Not because there is no urgency,
but because he knows
that truth never arrives
when summoned.
It waits
until you are soft enough
to receive it.
Some say the stars are fire.
He says they are memory —
each one a moment
we forgot to cherish
until it was too far
to reach.
He kneels beside the wounded fawn
not to heal it,
but to show it
that pain does not mean exile.
He does not fear endings.
He has lived enough
to know
that the final note
is not silence —
only stillness
before the next breath
begins.
So let the scroll remain unsealed.
Let the ink breathe.
Let the vow linger
between one chord and the next.
Not every love has a language.
Not every prayer needs a god.
Some truths arrive
in the ache between notes —
and stay
because someone
was willing
to listen.
-f.j.
The edge of dusk now surrenders sooner to the night. It is that time between seasons to light our candles and lanterns and stoke our hearths. And to remember a poet who wrote to remind us of the music we are.
In quiet,
In reverence,
