Back in my youth, when I used to scan the help-wanted ads in the newspapers—remember them?—in search of some occupational niche where a restless teenager might scare up a bit of income, I would often see positions with titles that were utterly obscure to me. What, I wondered, did an “Imaging Specialist” do? What skills did such a job require? Did one need to have a particularly febrile imagination, or great drawing skills?
I could go on, although more examples would only underscore how embarrassingly little I knew of the world of work—or the world more generally. But no job title was more baffling to me than this one: “Heavy Closer.” What on earth could that be? I conjured a mental picture of a beefy man, like an old-style bouncer or professional wrestler, who had the proven ability to…well, to close things. But what things? Doors? Overstuffed suitcases? I had no idea.
I would have had greater clarity if I could have jumped ahead a couple decades and watched the 1992 movie Glengarry Glen Ross, and particularly a deservedly famous scene featuring Alec Baldwin playing a true heavy closer. A thoroughly vain and repulsive fellow, Baldwin’s character swaggers into a real-estate office and gives a bullying pep talk to dispirited salesmen that climaxes with the admonition: “A. B. C.… Always. Be. Closing. Always Be Closing!!!” We get it: Closing here means finalizing a deal, doing whatever it takes to get the customer to “sign on the line which is dotted.” Never taking “No” for an answer.
Well, that’s one sense of closure. But there is a different usage that has become increasingly common. It refers to something psychological. Closure has become the word we use to describe that elusive sense of finality or resolution that comes to us, if we are lucky, after a painful or difficult experience, such as the death of a loved one, a divorce, the end of a romance, a professional failure, or the like. This sense of closure denotes a state of completion, a concluded healing of a wound, a finishing of the circle. Closure offers itself to us in the shape of a demi-nirvana, a liberation from suffering, whose achievement means that one has closed the door on the past, cabined it for good, put paid to it, consigned it to oblivion’s undotted line. One is back in control and can move on to the next chapter of life.