10/07/2026
I did not expect Ted Lasso to make me tear up but, here we are.
The season finale used Mary Oliver's "When Death Comes." I've stood in front of grieving families and read those words at end-of-life services. It's one people ask for when the person they lost was wide awake to life: the gardener, the traveler, the grandpa who knew every bird at the feeder.
What I love about it is that it isn't really about dying. It starts there, honestly and without softening anything, and then it becomes a poem about how to live so that you've done more than pass through.
Here's the full text for you to read it in its entirety.
WHEN DEATH COMES
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
--Mary Oliver
