The last time is always invisible when it is happening.
That is the hard fact of the lasts, which is that they are indistinguishable from the ordinaries when you are inside them, that the last time you do a thing with a person looks exactly like every other time until later, until the later when you understand that there was a last time and this was it and you were not watching it closely enough because you did not know to watch it closely and there is no way to know to watch it closely and still you wish you had.
The last time she and I made the Christmas meal together.
I did not know it was the last time. It looked like every other Christmas meal, like the particular coordinated chaos of two women in a kitchen who have different ideas about the right order of operations and have been negotiating those ideas for decades, who know by now which battles are worth having and which are just preference and have sorted most of them into preference and proceed accordingly. She was slower than the year before. I had noticed and not named it. We made the meal and we ate the meal and it was good and it was Christmas and that was enough and I did not hold it with the specific attention of a last time because it did not look like a last time.
It was the last time.
The next year the kitchen was too much, the standing was too long, the coordination required more than was available on that day and I made the meal and she sat at the table and directed from the table, which she was good at, which is her in another form, the same knowledge in a different posture.
I am trying to make peace with the not-knowing.
With the understanding that the last times are only visible from after, which means the best you can do is be present to all the times, to treat each one as if it could be the one you will need to go back to, not with dread but with the particular quality of attention that is also love, that says: this matters, this specific meal, this specific woman in this specific kitchen, this Christmas that is only this Christmas and will not come again.
I was present to that one. Not fully. More than some. Enough that I have something to go back to.
I am going to be more present to the ones that are left. Whatever is left. However many. I am going to be there for all of them as though each one could be the last, because each one could be, and presence is the only thing I have left to give that the lasts cannot take from me.
