The last time you did something you loved usually doesn’t announce itself. You didn’t know it was the last swim in that lake, the last holiday at that house, the last easy conversation with that person before things shifted. You were just doing the thing, the way you’d always done it, with no reason to treat it differently than any other time. And then life moved and the circumstances changed and you never did it again and the last time you did it you had no idea it was the last time so you weren’t paying enough attention and now the memory is ordinary when it should have been something you held.
This is one of the more quietly devastating features of being a person who doesn’t know the future. You can’t prepare the right kind of attention for last times because you don’t know they’re happening. You’d have to treat every instance of everything as if it might be the last one, which would be its own kind of madness — you’d never get anything done, you’d be standing in every doorway savoring it in case you don’t come back, you’d be insufferable at dinners. So you don’t. You just live through things assuming they’ll happen again and sometimes they don’t.
The ones that hurt most in retrospect are the last conversations with people who are no longer here. You talked to them the way you always talked — about nothing much, logistics, whatever was on top — because you thought there’d be another conversation, and another after that. The last one was just a conversation. You hung up without knowing you were hanging up forever. If you’d known you’d have said different things. You’d have said more. You’d have said the things you’d been saving for later, which turns out there wasn’t any of.
What you can do — the partial solution, the imperfect but available one — is treat certain things as though they might be the last time, not all the time, but sometimes. Not as a morbid exercise but as an act of attention. This dinner. This drive. This ordinary evening with this person. You don’t have to be dramatic about it. You don’t have to announce it. Just be in it a little more completely than you might otherwise be. Let it land. Notice that you’re here and the other people are here and the thing is happening and that’s not guaranteed to keep happening forever.
I don’t do this enough. I intend to and I forget and life goes fast and the ordinary moments stay ordinary because I let them. But sometimes, just sometimes, something catches — a particular evening, a table of people, a drive home after something good — and I think: remember this. Whatever comes next, remember this one. And for a moment I’m really there, completely there, not already somewhere else in my head. The moment stays ordinary. But I was in it. That turns out to matter more than I knew how to say until just now.