(627.4-628.16) After noticing HCE's change, ALP knows that her time is up. Just as he is being replaced by the sons, she is being replaced by her daughter. "Be happy, dear ones!" she says. "May I be wrong! For she'll be sweet for you as I was sweet when I came down out of me mother." ALP, the great river-mother, could have stayed in her childhood bedroom in the sky, yet she dropped down to earth for us. "First we feel," she says. "Then we fall."
"And let her rain now if she likes," ALP goes on, granting her royal crown to Isabel, who will now reign. "Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let." ALP has grown weary of the world and her planet of children, who she says are "becoming lothed to me." HCE, she says, is not the regal man she once thought she was, but rather a bumpkin. "I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory," she tells him. "You're but a puny." Worn out from bearing her burden, she is "[l]oonely in me loneness." She'll slip away before the children wake up. "They'll never see," she says. "Nor know. Nor miss me."
As we turn to the final page of Finnegans Wake, it is time for ALP to return to her "cold mad feary father," the great sea. She only has one leaf left from those that fell on her from the trees (the last leaf, or page, of the Wake, McHugh notes). She'll carry that leaf to remind her of everything that we've seen pass. Perhaps she'll see HCE, the great father, appear "under whitespread wings like he'd come from Arkangels." If he did, she says, "I sink I'd die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup" on the shore.
"End here," says ALP in the book's final lines. "Us then. Finn, again!" As she dissolves into the sea, she is given the "keys," both to her heart and to heaven, and sings a song of her (and our) travels: "A way a lone a last a loved a long the"
And with those words, the journey has ended. I can now say that I've read Finnegans Wake.
