Within the literature on music and death, authors often expound upon the cultural role or societal function of music in relation to death, especially in ruminations on the performance of works unfinished, which equate unfinishedness with incompleteness. In this paper, I differentiate between unfinishedness and incompleteness according to historical-fictional author as agent and work-persona as agent, respectively, in order to explore the abrupt ending -- a special formal and storytelling device in popular song and multimedia that combines finishedness and incompleteness as a symbolic representation of death. Leaning on theories of closure in popular music, I define a listener's song ending expectations within which unmarked and marked endings emerge corresponding to met and unmet expectations, respectively. A central analysis of Dolly Parton's "The Bridge" buttressed by two other analyses demonstrates how the viewer- listener ascribes meaning when confronted with the abrupt ending -- a marked temporal ending -- and the avoidance of closure.