If we look back, can we see them? A glance over the shoulder, a stare through time and the aching weight of all the minutes between now and then, can we force our minds to remember?
Maybe our minds keep them, maybe memories are stored somewhere impenetrable, maybe we’ve a vault deep in the caverns of our reminiscence that holds all that has held us. Maybe they are there though we know not they are there, maybe they’ve always been there, maybe they always will be.
These are the last lasts, the final installment in this three part series on all we will never be able to do again, to see again, to remember again.
These are the lasts we never knew were lasts, and now cannot remember at all.
These are the lasts that did not scar, did not carve their initials into the wood of our minds, the lasts that rose as if to speak, only to silently walk out the door forever. These are those lasts, and they too hurt.
Sarah cannot remember the last time Henry or Addie fell asleep in her arms, the last time she rocked them until they closed their tired eyes and drifted into dreams. She can circle around the year it could have happened, let her mind peek down like hawk from tree branch, but she cannot find that scurrying memory, mouse that sprints and leaps and hides beneath the snowfall. Had she known then, that late night she sat exhausted and worn thin in a rocking chair, one toe on the floor rising and falling and rising until small snores became the soundtrack to her midnight hour, maybe she would have slowed, stopped, and cherished it more. Maybe.
I cannot remember the last night I spent in my childhood bedroom. I cannot remember the final slumber with those walls decorated with all the photographs and posters, the quotations from famous thinkers, the blacklights on the wall to make the highlighter ink glow. I remember a thousand nights in that room, I remember sneaking kisses with dates when my door was supposed to be open, I remember playing Goldeneye with Sven at 2am on some frozen Saturday night during the school year, I remember looking back into it as I closed the door before getting into the car to drive to college, but I cannot remember the last night that bedroom was my bedroom. I cannot remember the ceremonious dismantling of all those posters by my mother, the repainting, I cannot remember the last time it was mine.
I don’t remember a million last conversations with ex-girlfriends, I cannot remember the last time I held their hands. I cannot remember the last drive in my first car, before it was handed down to my little sister, as it was handed down to me before her. I cannot remember where I went, I cannot remember the song that played on the busted stereo with quivering speakers. I cannot remember the feeling of those keys in these hands.
I have forgotten the last sleepover at my friend Greg’s house. I can easily imagine hundreds of them, see the bootlegged HBO logo pop up on a VHS tape we stuffed into the VCR sometime after midnight. I can remember the secret and shushed excited laughter when we saw breasts on the television for the first time. I can see them, all, but I cannot remember the final one, the last time before we got too old to do so, the last time before we knew we were beginning a chapter that didn’t read the same as the ones that came before it.
Do you remember the last time you ran through a sprinkler as a kid? The last time you went down a waterslide? Can you tell me, with precision, the last time you ate cereal at 11am on a Saturday morning and did nothing but watch cartoons? The final cartoon you watched? Can you remember the last meal you ate before you had a single thought about calories, or sugar, or carbohydrates, or any other nonsense? What was on the menu? What about the last time you believed, with zero hesitation or cynicism, that everything was just going to be alright? Can you remember the final time you walked through your local mall or shopping center before it was torn down? The last time you sat on Santa’s lap and told him what you wanted for Christmas? Can you remember the name of the last person in high school that gave you butterflies that threatened to lift your stomach through your throat, out your mouth, and disappear into the clouds?
What are the lasts that you didn’t realize were lasts, and now cannot seem to pinpoint however hard you try? Are there moments that you wish you would have savored more?
Somewhere along the way, some unnoticed pitstop on the eternal highway of our existence, we did something for the final time and never knew.
We spend a lifetime making memories, filling our tiny existences with experience, with heart-saturating adventures, with heartbreaking failures. We do a million firsts, cartwheeling headfirst into so many things we’ve never tried before, but we also do a million lasts. We waltz through these, I think, we forget to pay attention, we forget to truly understand.
Sometimes we do, and this three part journey through Lasts is about all the different kinds. Those we know ahead of time will be the last, those we do not, and those we somehow misplace in the messy attic of our minds.
My purpose in writing this piece is to call them out, is to shine a light on not the firsts that get all the headlines, but the lasts that are relegated to the final third of the Oscar ceremony of our lives, the “In Memoriam” section that plays like a slideshow over some melancholy music in our souls.
We owe it to them, we owe it to ourselves, to be more mindful of these. We owe it to ourselves to be more mindful, period, and that’s been so much of the focus of this Signal Fire this year. I’ve been worried about the sneaky disruption that distraction has been causing in our lives, the way it’s pulling us so far away from what is here, what is now, that I’ve wanted to do something, anything about it.
I don’t know if this will help, but I’ve spent three weeks now trying to show you, trying to remind you, that something we’re doing right now might be the last time we ever do it. That reading even this newsletter, might be the last time you do. We never know what’s coming for us, we never know what will be the final time, so why not treat everything as though it just might be.
This is old advice, recycled and rehashed from something two dozen people have probably told you six dozen times, but it’s still important. It still matters.
Life is filled with lasts that have passed without us knowing. Moments we now wish we could see with clarity, moments we wish we could re-live. Now is our chance to make sure fewer and fewer go this same way, that when we come to our own last breaths we carry no weight of what we could have done, could have seen, could have remembered.
Let us remember, let us live as though a last is right around the corner. Let us be where we are, as we are, and let us be all the way there.
It’s the only way.
Silently they go
leaving no trace they were here.
We forget them all.
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