My LOST Moment

Matt, 31 — New Jersey (USA) :

It was THE end of “The End”. I had watched all six seasons of Lost with my parents; it started when I was a single college student living at home, and it ended with them joining my wife and me in our own home.

I had spent the six seasons living and dying with every episode. Usually I would pause and think out loud, my mother joining in to the half-baked, literary discussion, my father patiently waiting. During the course of the six seasons my girlfriend-then-wife had been brought up to speed in the beginning, then her interest waned, then she came back for the final few episodes.

So there we were, my wife, parents and I, watching the finale conclude. Since the end date had been announced three years earlier, we had all asked ourselves “How will it end?” And then, in what seemed to be a single moment, it was explained: they lived, they died, they were together, they moved on. The love they felt for one another on this world would keep them together in the next.

It had been daylight when we started watching; it was deep dusk as our characters faded to white, as Jack died, and as the white “LOST” appeared on blackened screen, a resolved, happy, harmonic cord playing. We sat in stunned silence; my cheeks were wet with my tears.

There was no discussion while the credits played. We were stunned —we were heartbroken— we were fulfilled.

As I turned the TV off (and kept the lights off, for I didn’t want my father to see that I had cried), I shared aloud a personal flashback aloud: standing in a convenience store in September 2004, seeing in a magazine that one of those hobbits was in the plane crash show… deciding to give it a try.

Lost had found me. I’ll be eternally grateful.