Nostalgia for Lasts

As I write this, on Sunday, June 13, it is my son’s last day as a teenager–tomorrow he will be twenty years old. He made it! His last day as a tween (June 13, 2014), my husband and I told him, “You know, beginning tomorrow and for as long as you are a teenager, every day is touch and go. You may not live until bedtime.” (Aside: To be fair, this is always the case. None of us is guaranteed until bedtime. It just seems more acute to the parents of teenagers, mostly because we, as parents, spend a lot of their teenaged years wanting to strangle them.)

He gave us one of those looks that only twelve-year-olds have mastered and said, “Yeah. I know.”

It’s been an unremarkable day, but because I am memorializing it in this post, I will always remember it. But thinking about it in those terms has made me nostalgic for all those lasts I didn’t know were lasts until much later. Now that I think about it, that happens with a lot of lasts, because if you know it’s the last, you try to commemorate it in some way. I wish it were possible to go back to some lasts, know they were lasts, and take pictures, or something else to remember the occasion.

I didn’t know my daughter’s last gymnastics meet was her last until she decided to retire, but we have video of all her events and I remember the trip (to Boise) and the meet quite vividly. What I don’t remember is my son’s last soccer game, because he retired from the sport rather suddenly, and without discussing it with us first. And though I spent nine years on soccer sidelines and never quite learned the game (ball in net = good, unless my son is standing in front of the net, then bad), I still would have liked to know the last one was the last one. I would have cheered more loudly (my son would say this is not possible. Despite not understanding the game, I was a loud soccer fan), congratulated my son on a game well played (which I often did anyway), and reminded him how much I loved to watch him play.

A lot of the lasts I would like to remember are baby and little kid things. I’d like to remember the last time they slept in a crib, and then the last night in the toddler bed. I’d like to remember the last time I bathed each of them in the sink, the last time I changed a diaper, and the last time I had to take each of them to the potty. My daughter famously decided–at eight months old–on a vacation to Disney World that she no longer wanted me to feed her, but I wish I could remember the last jar (or plastic container) of baby food I fed to each of my babies.

I remember the last conversation I had with my friend Courtney before she died, and I’ve often invoked a line stolen from Forrest Gump, “If I had known it was the last time we would talk, I would have thought of something better to say.” I’m not sure what that “something better” would have been, but it would have been about something other than the pumpkin bread I’d just given her. She loved pumpkin things. But I wish I had the same memory of the last conversation I had with my mother in law before she died. I hope I was kind. I wasn’t always.

There is, to be sure, an element of regret in all of these things. If only I had known, sure, but also a little bit of I hope I didn’t fuck it up. I wish I had something poetic and eloquent to say here about the human condition, but I really don’t. Sometimes we fuck things up, and sometimes it’s the last time. Maybe the upshot is that the other people involved don’t remember it was the last time, either. So today and always, do what makes you happy. You never know when it’s the last time.

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Whatever Will Be update: I know I just gave an update not too long ago, but here is another one, because my cover artist sent me a text of the completed art today.

I love it so much and it really seems like it really will be a really real book one day. With a cover!