There will be a last time, and you will not notice it.
I found a blue cap the other day.
It was woolen, small, faded now in the way that wool fades — not dramatically, just quietly giving up its color over years. My father wore it. He felt the cold terribly, especially on his head, and so he would pull this cap on and go about his day looking, I always thought, slightly comical.
I can see him in it. Reading in his chair with the cap on. Walking out to the gate with the cap on. Sitting at the table in the morning, hands around a cup, cap pulled down over his ears, saying something I no longer remember.
He is gone now.
And here is the thing that stopped me, standing there with that cap in my hands.
There was a last time I saw him wearing it.
There was an actual afternoon, an actual hour, an actual moment when he put that cap on his head for the final time in my presence, and I looked at him, and I looked away, and I thought nothing at all of it. It was ordinary. There was probably a lecture I was preparing for my class. Or perhaps I had to pick up my wife from the station.
I do not remember it.
The last time came and went, and it did not announce itself, and I let it pass the way you let a hundred thousand ordinary moments pass, because it looked exactly like all the ones before it.
I tell this story because it is not a story about my father, and it is not a story about grief. It is a story about the structure of your life, right now, today, while you are reading this.
Everything that exists in time and space will one day go away. This is not a gloomy thought. It is simply an accurate one. And it has a consequence that we almost never sit with: if everything ends, then everything has a last time. Not a final, ceremonial, well-attended last time. Just a last time – usually indistinguishable from all the other times.
Consider.
There will be a last time you eat at your favorite restaurant. You will order the thing you always order. You will not know.
There will be a last time you drive a particular road you have driven ten thousand times.
There will be a last time you pick up your child and carry her – and this one is almost cruel in its ordinariness, because one day you set her down and you simply never pick her up again, and neither of you notices.
There will be a last time you speak to a particular friend on the telephone. You will say something casual at the end. You will both assume there is more.
There will be a last time you hear a certain voice say your name.
There will be a last time you walk out of your own front door.
And some of these have already happened. That is the part that catches in the throat.
There was a last time you visited your high school. You do not know when it was. You did not stand at the gate and take a long look. You just left the way you had left a thousand times, and then you never went back.
There was a last time you played the game you played every evening as a child, in the street, until it got dark and someone called you in. There was a final evening of that. Nobody marked it. The game simply stopped happening, and years later you noticed the absence rather than the ending.
There was a last time an older relative told you a story about your family, and now the story exists only in the fragment you happened to retain.
You have already lived through these. They are behind you. They passed unremarked, dressed as ordinary days.
On the thirtieth of January, 1969, the Beatles carried their equipment up to the roof of their Apple Corps headquarters on Savile Row and played for forty-two minutes. Billy Preston joined them on keyboards. Down in the street, people stopped to listen – most of them office workers on their lunch break, standing in the cold, mildly puzzled. On nearby rooftops others climbed up to see what the noise was. Somebody complained. The Metropolitan Police arrived and asked them to turn it down.
They finished with “Get Back.” John Lennon leaned into the microphone and said he would like to thank everyone on behalf of the group and himself, and that he hoped they had passed the audition. It got a laugh.
That was the last time the Beatles ever played in public. Nobody on that roof knew it. Nobody in the street knew it. The most famous band in the history of the world ended with a joke about an audition, a policeman asking them to keep the volume down, and a crowd of people who had to get back to work.
You can watch it here. Watch the faces in the street. That is what a last time actually looks like.
Now – what do you do with this?
Not this: you do not walk around in dread, treating every farewell as a potential catastrophe, clutching at people, unable to let anyone leave the room. That is not awareness. That is anxiety wearing awareness as a costume.
And not this either: you do not manufacture intensity. You do not stage a meaningful moment. The moment is not made meaningful by your production values.
Here is what you do.
You show up. Fully. In the ordinary one.
You put down the phone when the ordinary conversation is happening. You actually look at the face of the person who is talking to you at breakfast – not to memorize it against future loss, but simply because they are there and you are there and this is the entire deal. You let the ordinary evening be an ordinary evening, and you are in it, rather than in the next thing.
Because you cannot identify the last time. You will never be able to. The last time is only ever visible from the far side, and by then you are standing in a room holding a blue woolen cap.
But you can be present for the ones you are in.
And if you are present for enough of them, then whichever one turns out to have been the last will have had you in it. Not a distracted version of you. Not the version that was half thinking about the email. You.
That is the only thing you actually get to control here. Not how many times. Just whether you were there.
There is one thing you can do deliberately, and I have written about it before because it works. Here is my earlier blog on it.
When you are with your husband or your wife, with your child, with your mother, with a friend you have known for forty years – occasionally, quietly, without saying anything about it to anyone, hold this thought: this is the last time I will see this person.
Do not announce it. Do not make it an occasion. Just hold it, lightly, at the back of your mind, and then carry on with the perfectly ordinary conversation you were having.
Watch what happens.
The small resentment you have been nursing since March simply stops mattering. The thing you were going to correct them about becomes not worth correcting. The part of you that was waiting for a gap so you could say your piece goes quiet. What is left is the person in front of you, which is all that was ever actually there.
Do not do this often. It is too strong for daily use, and it loses its force if it becomes a mechanical habit. But do it sometimes, sincerely.
I remember the cap.
When I catch myself moving through a conversation at half attention, waiting for it to finish so I can get to the thing I have decided is more important, the memory reminds me: this one, too, is one of a finite number. This one, too, might be a last time. Not probably. But possibly. As all of them are.
So be here for it.
Peace!
