'All things come to an end': A last meeting with Samuel Beckett

Award winning writer Mark Axelrod recalls a poignant final lunch with Beckett

I removed the crudely wrapped cigars from my leather bag, crudely wrapped as only I could crudely wrap them and handed the cigars to Beckett. He unwrapped the paper and when he saw they were the same cigars he smoked he looked at me with a look that was both perplexing and grateful, a look that would have suggested that what I had given him was a gift beyond all measure, a gift that was speechlessly invaluable. He asked me how I knew; I said I merely remembered.

And so they stayed a little while, Mr. Beckett and Mr. Axelrod looking at each other with Mr. Beckett’s hand on Mr. Axelrod’s shoulder, looking straight before him, at nothing in particular, and then Mr. Beckett thanked Mr. Axelrod, stuffed the boxes in his coat, bid Mr. Axelrod a safe trip home, shook his hand and left. A left turn, a right turn and he was gone though the sky, falling to the buildings, and the buildings falling to the river, made as pretty a picture, in the afternoon light, as a man could hope to meet with, on a waning day in April.

But the day wasn’t over for me. What I could not fathom was the line “All things come to an end.” Depressed and sullen discourse. One fathoms such a line from a dictionary of well-worn phrases perhaps, but not in the context of someone of Beckett’s literary station.

I recall I left the café, ambled, turning down aleatory alleys until I eventually found myself walking along the Seine, somewhere along the Seine, perhaps near the Hotel Lauzun, perhaps not, it didn’t really matter, repeating the line, the same line he spoke not that long ago, “All things come to an end.” 

The wind picked up. I couldn’t light my Dutch cigars. “No symbols where none intended.” How prescient he was. 

Fewer than two years later he was gone.

 

Mark Axelrod is a professor and former Chair of English and Comparative Literature at Chapman University, California. He is a multiple award winner for his work.

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