THE WAIT

"We've been waiting for you," Locke tells Jack as he enters the main church. This is the last line in the series. Jack then greets Desmond, Boone, Hurley, Sawyer and Kate.  Charlie, Claire, Aaron, Jin, Sun, Sayid, Shannon, Rose, Bernard, Juliet, Libby and Penny are in the pews. Christian is walking about away from this main group.

In an unexplained slight of hand, everyone in the church had been waiting for Jack to arrive. Or more likely, for Jack to "awaken" and realize that he was dead. Being dead apparently releases all the pent up anxiety, anger, daddy issues and emotional baggage piled up during one's life time. It turns one into a smiling pod person waiting for final instructions from his cult leader.

 We waited for six seasons to come to this scripted conclusion. Was it truthful to the series?

1. Everyone in the church had something in common.  TRUE. They were all dead.

2. Everyone in the church knew each other. FALSE. Penny only briefly met the O6 people on her boat. She never met Boone, Charlie, Locke, Shannon, Rose, Juliet, Libby, Sayid or Bernard. Christian only met Sawyer briefly in Sydney. Newborn Aaron does not know anyone in the church.

3. Everyone in the church had been to this church before. FALSE. Only the O6 people returning to the island, Jack, Kate, Hurley and Sayid had seen Eloise's church before the ending.

4. Everyone in the church had found their "soul mate."  FALSE. Locke is in the church alone with no special person (like his girlfriend Helen). Also, Boone is effectively alone in the church as Shannon was paired off with Sayid. Christian was also alone without Jack's mother.

5. Everyone in the church seems happy and content. TRUE. There were no facial signs of stress or discomfort on any of the participants. In fact, most had the goofy grins of being under ether.

6. Everyone in the church had the same moral foundation to move on into the after life. FALSE. Despite the various sins of the main characters (murder, arson, fraud, torture, adultery, theft, lying, etc.) there was no redemptive, sin cleansing moment before the church reunion. Newborn Aaron, for example, was not alive long enough to be evil or sin. It would seem that the pure act of dying erased any moral consequences for prior actions.

7. Everyone in the church needed each other in order to move on. TRUE, but with a caveat. That is the assumption, but Ben was given the choice to join them and he passed on Hurley's offer. Rose and Bernard lived out their lives on the island without the help of anyone in the church. One would think they would not "need" the group to move on to heaven. They could do so without anyone's help. It was apparently an option that everyone in the church decided was appropriate.

8. Jack's presence was needed in order for everyone to have closure in their lives. FALSE. When Christian said everyone present died well before and well after Jack, that must mean that people had a life beyond the island, and beyond the interaction with Jack. As we have surmised, the people who left the island (Kate, Miles, Claire, Sawyer) would have been young enough to have long lives in the States. They would have met new people and spent more years creating new, longer lasting bonds and relationships. If Jack was needed to close the last hole in their lives, it really is a sad commentary on their post-island lives.

9. When Christian opened the doors, the white light transported everyone to heaven. FALSE. We do not know what happened next. One assumption is that they went to heaven. Another assumption is that they time flashed back to the island (in a cruel game, a reboot without past memories to see if things would turn out differently). Or the characters could have been vaporized into nothingness, an atheist view of what happens in death without any religious meanings.

We all waited for the conclusion to the series. We waited for the answers to the big questions. But just analyzing the end of the series, the church scene, we still wonder what LOST was really all about. It may be summed up by this observation:

Laugh when you can, apologize when you should, and let go of what you can't change. Kiss slowly, play hard, forgive quickly, take chances, give everything and have no regrets. Life's too short to be anything but happy. — Unknown