You Rarely Know It Is the Last Time

First times are marked. There is a photograph, a date someone remembers, a small ceremony even if it is only a sentence said aloud: the first day, the first word, the first time we did this. We are good at firsts.

Last times are not marked, and this is the thing I have been noticing for a while now. You learn that something was the last time only later, sometimes years later, when you reach for it and find it is not there. By then the ordinary afternoon that turned out to be final has long since been filed with all the other afternoons, and you cannot get it back out to look at it properly, because at the time you did not know it was anything.

A few that I missed

The last time I walked out of an office I had spent years in, I was thinking about parking. There was no moment at the door. I did not turn around. I had a meeting across town and the garage was going to be full and that was the entire content of my mind as I crossed a threshold I would never cross again. I did not know.

The last unhurried dinner with a friend before his news came was a dinner like fifty before it. We talked about nothing in particular. I probably checked my phone. After the news, every dinner was a different kind of dinner, with a shape to it, and I would have given a good deal to have the shapeless one back, the one where neither of us was being brave.

The last time someone small needed me to carry something up the stairs, I did it without looking, the way you do a thing you have done a thousand times. There was never another. Children do not announce the day they stop needing to be carried. They simply stop, and the stopping is a kind of success, and you are proud of it, and it is also the end of something that nobody put on a calendar.

I could go on, and so could you. Everyone who has lived long enough has a list, and the list is almost entirely made of ordinary days.

The wrong lesson

There is a way to take this that leads straight to dread. You start treating every ordinary moment as a possible ending, and you try to be present for all of it, with the intensity of someone at a deathbed, and you ruin it. A dinner that is being memorized is not a dinner. A child who is being gazed at as if for the last time will ask what is wrong. Ceremony kills the thing it is meant to honor when it is applied to everything, and the lesson "cherish every moment" is, in practice, a recipe for cherishing none of them, because cherishing is exhausting and most moments do not want it.

I do not think the answer is to live as though every day were your last. People who try that are either lying or insufferable. Most days are not your last, and the ability to treat them as ordinary is one of the great mercies of being alive.

What I am after instead

What I am after is something quieter than cherishing. Call it attention, of a particular unanxious kind. Not the attention of someone trying to hold on, but the attention of someone who is simply there, in the room, aware that it is a room and that there are people in it.

It would have been enough, at the office door, to look up from the parking question for the length of one breath and see the place. Not to feel anything about it. Just to see it. It would have been enough, at the fifty-first dinner, to let it be fully a dinner, phone face down, the conversation about nothing allowed to be the conversation it was. It would have been enough, on the stairs, to notice the weight.

It is the difference between being present and being merely located, and I think most of us are merely located for most of the hours of our lives, pointed at the next thing, with the current thing happening somewhere in our peripheral vision. The last times slip past unmarked not because we failed to perform a ceremony but because we were not, in the plain sense, there.

Repetition is where the life is

Here is what I have come to believe after a long time of building things on deadlines. Almost nothing I shipped under pressure is what I would want back. The launches, the closes, the moments that felt at the time like the ones that counted, have mostly faded into a general sense of having been busy. What I would want back are a handful of unmarked afternoons, and the only thing that would have made them better is if I had been more fully in them.

Most of what turns out to have mattered was repetition. The same dinner, the same walk, the same small person on the same stairs, over and over, until one day it was not. Repetition is the texture of a life, and repetition is exactly what we are worst at seeing, because the mind files the familiar under "already known" and stops looking. The hundredth time looks like the ninety-ninth. Only afterward do you learn that it was also the last, and that it was the last that gave all the others their weight.

A practice, if you want one

I am wary of ending with an instruction, because instructions are the wrong register here. But there is one small thing I do now, and I will offer it in case it is useful.

When I notice I am in the middle of something I have done many times, I let myself think, lightly, without drama: this is one of them. Not "this might be the last." Just: this is one of the ordinary ones, and the ordinary ones are the ones that count. And then I look at whoever is there, and I stay for the length of one breath, and then I go back to the dinner or the walk or the stairs, and I let it be ordinary again.

It does not make the last times announce themselves. Nothing does. But it means that when I finally learn which one was last, I will at least have been in the room for it, and that, it turns out, is most of what I would have wanted.