There Is a Last Time for Everything
Holding the truth of endings in the heart of living
Everything can be counted. Each thing we do, the number of days we live or sleep next to someone we love, how many times we walked the dog before her final heartbeat at seventeen, all of these, and maybe everything else that happens, is finite.
I slept by her side only once. I breathed each breath fully trying to capture her, the fleeting beauty of her nearness. It hurt. It brought me into the place where the cost of life’s relentless wave of change is felt unguarded.
Everything can be counted. I think about this truth often. I don’t sit down to do the calculations although I’m curious as to what the numbers would be. Maybe I’ve had 3,573 conversations with my closest friend and 10,104 meals with my parents before my mother died at seventy-nine. How many goodbyes will we say?
How many times will we laugh or have the shadow of grief move across our hearts?
When we are new to this world our firsts are counted, for the lucky ones by delighting stewards of our vulnerable infant selves. A first smile or step.
Breaths, heartbeats, discreet packages of quantifiable experience. A long line of numbers that trace a life.
In the marrow of life we find the illusion of forever, the uncounted. Then as we draw closer to what may seem like the end, we begin again, counting towards lasts.
Firsts and lasts, the edges of an existence, before the open space finds us again.
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