Out of the books we read in this class, Life After Life is one of those precious few whose endings are not really there. But it is. But it isn’t. It’s a complicated ending, and one that fits exactly within the conventions of the novel. Not very many stories can be told about one woman’s unnatural ability to die and live the same life with different choices, especially when one of those timelines diverges from befriending Hitler to killing him.

Ursula Beresford Todd was born and died immediately. She was born and lived. She drowned and almost drowned. She was shot, blown apart by bombs, crushed by debris, shot Hitler, and so much more. How does one bring a story filled with so many different lives and experiences to a sensible close?

Well, you don’t. Not really.

The final chapter brings it back full circle. Between every death of one Ursula and the birth of another, the book doubles back to the day of her birth, as a chapter titled “Snow”. Each of the other characters experience the day of her birth in a different way, and each rebirth brings a different perspective. As the novel progresses, more experiences come to light on that fateful night when the girl who cannot die just once was born. The final “Snow” chapter simply recounts a final perspective of the adults, and then the novel is over.

There is no real explanation of how Ursula can relive her life and choose differently, no way that she can remember her past mistakes, and no final revelation on how this strange collection of lives can come together. There’s no single wrap-up, no final life where she lives until she’s 100, or uses her power and knowledge to enlighten her children. It just ends with the beginning, and doesn’t add another story to the collection.

And that is really the only way it could have ended. If any other life could have been lead, then Ursula would never ever be free from her cycle, and we would never have a true sense of closure for her. If that was simply the end of the choices that she could have made, then it would cut the story off too neatly. But instead, Kate Atkinson leaves it with her birth,neither confirming her first death nor implying that she will live on another time. Ursula’s story ends in the muddled middle ground of her birth: an uncertain side road of time, where nothing moves and yet where nothing has ended. Her life is fulfilled and empty, beginning and ending, all at once.

So why in the world would you definitively end Ursula’s tale, when it endlessly starts over and stops? The world of the story exists in that liminal space between life and death, and Atkinson’s choice to not define an ending by convention means strands the story within the potentiality of a thousand other lines of adventure.

And what better way to end than without a true ending.