The last week of the ironing shop

In a side street in Sohag, an old man has run an ironing shop for forty years. His son will take it over. Everyone on the street has known this for a long time, including the old man.

What usually happens next is familiar. He works harder than ever in the final months, refuses help, keeps every customer's habits in his head, and then one morning he simply is not there. The son opens the shutter and finds a pile of shirts, a book of names he cannot read, and customers who ask, politely and then less politely, where the father has gone.

Nothing about this ending was a surprise. It was on the calendar for years. What was missing was not warning but a way of arriving at it slowly.

We do this with most transitions. A shop changing hands, a product being withdrawn, a job being handed over, a child leaving home. Because we know the change is coming, we treat the time before it as the last chance to carry on exactly as before. Then the change arrives all at once, with a jolt that the calendar never required.

The alternative is plain and a little dull. Start handing over early. Let the son take the counter two mornings a week, then four. Introduce him to the regulars by name. Let customers see both of them for a season, so that by the time the father stops coming, nobody has to notice.

Some endings really are sudden. Most are not. For those, the kind thing, to ourselves and to everyone depending on us, is to begin easing off while there is still time to do it gently.