The Ending of Jayber Crow (spoilers inside)

Hey all,

I just read Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow over the course of the past few days - the last 100 or so pages of it this evening, leaving my mind swimming and me utterly unable to sleep. I always get attached to the characters in (what I consider to be good) books, and have learned to anticipate a certain sadness and withdrawal when the story ends. However, upon finishing Jayber Crow I feel nearly overwhelmed with my own personal sense of loss and grief.

Many things about this book impressed themselves deeply upon me - Jayber's perception of the world and authority as a child, his restlessness and unwillingness to be "known" (at least for a long while), the characters of Port William who lived and died within the pages of the novel, their stories, the town of Port William and it's surrounding area itself. I could go on and on. There was so much joy and grief mixed together throughout the novel that I find myself left with much that same mix inside myself.

I am particularly interested to hear people's interpretations of the ending of the novel, though, specifically when Jayber says to Mattie, "But what about this other thing?" and Mattie replies, "Yes."

I took this to mean that he was asking about his love for her - if she had known about it all along, and/or if she loved him in return. I have to say that until the very near the end of the book, I never could bring myself to give up hope that Troy would end up in some kind of machine accident and Jayber and Mattie would have some time together. There were moments when it became increasingly clear that this would not be the case (like when he said that their meetings in the Nest Egg took place over 14 or 15 years) that I was filled with so much pain for Jayber's alone-ness and unrequited love that I just had to close my eyes. I physically hurt reading it.

So, I guess I'm just kind of hoping that in the end his feelings were requited, that Mattie had been aware of him and his feelings for her and had just been of enough character to not even let on that she knew, given her married situation. I sure hope that's a prevailing interpretation.

But even so, I just feel so sad putting the story away. The loss of Mat, Athey, Burley, and so many others just makes it hard not to feel... well, a deep sense of loss. Even the loss of so much of Port William (buildings and enterprises) and the Nest Egg is just painful. It's been hard in real life to know people who have outlived most everything that they once knew, and it's hard not to feel pain thinking of Jayber in that same light.

All the feels...