What No Unfinished Business Is Becoming

When I first started thinking about No Unfinished Business, I had a fairly clear idea of who I wanted to serve. I wanted to help people who were dealing with a loved one facing a long-term illness, because that was the world I knew. That was the world I had lived in for years with my mother.

For those who are new here and haven’t read the other parts of my story, my mother struggled with drug addiction and later developed Parkinson’s and dementia. We began to understand the seriousness of what we were dealing with around 2020, shortly after the pandemic began. At the time, I had no idea how long the road ahead of us would be. What unfolded became a journey of roughly five years, and during those years I learned more about my mother, myself, relationships, forgiveness, anger, responsibility, love and emotional completion than I ever expected to learn.

In the beginning, I thought No Unfinished Business was going to be primarily about that experience. How do you show up when someone you love is sick for a long time? How do you deal with all the history that existed before the illness? How do you care for someone when the relationship itself may have been complicated? How do you say the things that need to be said while you still have the opportunity to say them?

Those questions are still very much a part of this work. But after my mother died, I began to realize that No Unfinished Business was becoming something much larger. When she was gone, there was suddenly nothing left for me to manage. No emergency to solve. No phone call to answer. No next appointment. No crisis waiting around the corner. After spending years moving through that experience with her, I found myself standing in a world where it was simply over.

For the first few months, I was trying to understand what life looked like on the other side of it. Then, seven weeks after my mother died, my cousin Jason died by suicide. His death affected me differently because there had been no long runway preparing me for it. With my mother, as painful as it was, I knew where the road was eventually leading. There had been time to talk, time to work through things, time to forgive, time to get angry, time to come back together, time to say what needed to be said and, ultimately, time to become complete with her. Jason’s death reminded me that we are not always given that opportunity.

That realization began changing the way I thought about No Unfinished Business. It stopped being only about how we deal with someone who is dying and started becoming a question about how we deal with everyone who is living. It also made me look at who I was to other people.

Was I saying what I actually felt? Was I expressing appreciation when I felt it? Was I cleaning things up when something needed to be cleaned up? Was I allowing resentment, pride or fear to keep conversations unfinished? Was I showing up in a way that represented the person I believed myself to be?

Several months later, during the holidays, the grief surrounding my mother became much heavier. It had been about seven months since she died, and I genuinely missed her. There wasn’t necessarily something to fix. My heart was simply broken, and I had to allow myself to experience that.

During that period, I had a realization that changed the entire direction of this work.

Having no unfinished business with another person is ultimately about having no unfinished business with yourself.

That landed differently for me.

Because at the end of our lives, we are the ones who have to live with how we showed up.

Did I love the way I wanted to love? Did I tell people what they meant to me? Did I apologize when I needed to apologize? Did I forgive when forgiveness was possible? Did I have the difficult conversation instead of avoiding it? Did I behave according to my values even when somebody else wasn't behaving according to theirs?

And maybe most importantly: if this relationship ended tomorrow, would I be complete with who I was inside of it?

That question has become one of the lenses through which I try to live my life now.

It does not mean every relationship has to be repaired. It does not mean everybody belongs in your life. Completion and reconciliation are not necessarily the same thing. Sometimes having no unfinished business means saying something. Sometimes it means listening. Sometimes it means apologizing. Sometimes it means forgiving. Sometimes it means creating a boundary and walking away knowing that you have said what needed to be said and acted in a way you can live with.

The point is not to control how the other person responds. The point is to become responsible for your side of the relationship. That is where I believe No Unfinished Business is beginning to grow beyond its original purpose.

I hesitate to call it a “movement,” because that word can sound a little grandiose—and occasionally a little cult-like, which is definitely not what we are building here. But there is something larger emerging from this idea. It is becoming a way of looking at how we show up in the world.

Most people never imagine that today's conversation with someone could be their last. We operate as though there will always be another phone call, another Christmas, another birthday, another dinner or another opportunity to clean something up. Usually there is.

Until there isn't.

One of the strange gifts I received through my mother's illness was time. As difficult as those years were, I was given the opportunity to look at our relationship while she was still alive. We had years of history between us, and plenty of it was messy. But I had the opportunity to work through that history before she died.

Not everyone gets that.

That is why this work matters so much to me now.

No Unfinished Business is not grief counseling. We are not therapists, and we are not trying to replace therapy or the important work trained mental-health professionals provide. What we are interested in is something different: helping people examine how they are participating in their relationships and how they want to live while they still have the opportunity to make choices about it.

There is a level of maturity required to do that.

It takes integrity to ask, “What is mine here?”

It takes courage to stop waiting for somebody else to become different before you decide who you are going to be.

And it takes awareness to recognize that one day, whether through death, distance, circumstance or simply the changing seasons of life, some of these relationships will end.

When that happens, the question becomes: Can I live with how I showed up?

That is increasingly what No Unfinished Business means to me.

And while the heart of this work deals with some very real subjects—illness, relationships, death, grief, forgiveness and emotional completion I don't want this community to become a place where everything feels heavy. Living completely also means actually living.

I want us to have fun.

I want us to create events that bring people together. I want us to serve our community. I want people to laugh, connect, meet one another, have conversations, learn something about themselves and occasionally just enjoy being alive.

Because the lesson underneath all of this isn't that death is coming.

The lesson is that life is happening now.

No Unfinished Business started with my experience caring for my mother. Her illness gave me the classroom. Her death gave me perspective. Jason's death expanded the lesson. And everything that has happened since has continued asking me the same question in different ways:

Who do I want to be while I am here?

That's the question I want this work to help people explore.

Not how to create perfect relationships. Not how to avoid grief. Not how to guarantee that everything gets resolved neatly before somebody dies.

But how to live with enough awareness, courage, integrity and love that when a chapter closes whenever and however it closes you can look at the person you were inside of it and know there was nothing important you knowingly left unsaid, unloved or undone.

That is what No Unfinished Business is becoming.

And, increasingly, I think that is what it was always supposed to be.

-Stanley Fisher jr.