The “last time” we do anything is rarely known, at the moment we experience it.
I don’t remember the “last time” I read my girls a story in bed, or the last time I got a letter from my dad, nor the last time we’d have our Thanksgiving party on School Street. Some things are the gradual – the undetectable consequence of time – while others are interrupted by the unexpected – an accident, a pandemic.
And so it was with the fire that burned down our house and neighborhood two weeks ago.
I didn’t realize there would be a last time I wore those earrings from Ghana found at a Parisian flea market, or that I’d be explaining the picture of me after hiking Kilimanjaro – for the last time. Opening the dutch door in the magic hour of evening light, walking to the bluffs with Renee, wearing my grandmother’s pearls with jeans, meeting at the gate for neighborhood news with Matt… for the last time.
We hadn’t lived in our house for 47 years, like the couple I encountered at Target yesterday, half dazed, buying a new vacuum cleaner. But we’d traveled with so many of our things for decades, through 9 cross-country moves, between us. Heirlooms, keepsakes – notes from friends who are no longer here.
Some “things” are just things.
But other things tell our (your) story.
Narratives that explain who we are to other people, yes, but mostly they are clues to who we are and how we became… ourselves.
We recognize who we are by what we’ve done, who we’ve known, what we’ve seen. The objects that surround us are the breadcrumbs of memory, and memory is the framing of a life. When those cues evaporate, within minutes, in the dark of night, among many feelings is one of panic; an almost automatic need to acknowledge everything in the house as a means to retrieving the experiences and relationships they embody. Will I forget the reason we have that lithograph? That painted dove? Will I remember exactly what she wrote me in that card, since she’s no longer here to tell me?
Our things don’t make us who we are, yet they are the receipts that remind us of a conversation, the mood of a certain life chapter, a relationship through time. From the profoundly meaningful to the profoundly funny (maybe two versions of the same thing), they form our emotional DNA.
People naturally want to know – how are you guys doing?
Well, I find myself very tired. I can’t make plans more than a few hours or at most a day in advance.
We have been flooded with support, donations, and just as much love as a person can hold in a heart. From those we’ve known for 40 years to those we met last week, the level of showing up has unspooled our most stoic instincts.
All of this matters immensely in a crisis, when it comes to a hard or soft landing.
Yet, the empty feeling lurks behind new corners. And it’s an exhausting kind of presence.
Simple daily moments are disorienting.
Looking for that ceramic mug, a gift from the Australian exchange students.
Or the bathing suit that always works.
That cashmere blanket I sewed back together after the kids tried to use it as a tent.
(That raggedy house-sweater that absolutely no one misses but me.)
And, during many moments throughout the day, I feel lucky.
We got to walk away from what could have been even worse.
Still, that life is over – a strange weight dragging behind me as I make slow progress on starting a new one.
But going through a singular life-changing event brings with it a different contour than a collective, community-wide trauma. There is some comfort walking this road with so many others who also said goodbye to a life without realizing their last times in it. The togetherness of what could have felt deeply lonely is not the sense of belonging anyone hopes to have. Yet, it is the difference that makes the sadness, the inertia, the lost feeling, and even the joys and highs that have surprised us since then – shared.
The “last time” is often not recognizable as the finale.
And living as though each daily circumstance “could” be, carries its own stress.
But… and this is unequivocally not a silver lining kind of “but.”
Maybe it’s a means to see things through the framing of the “first time,” instead.
A perspective of novelty, curiosity – of possibility.
It might be the only way to walk forward, since this experience is genuinely the first time any of us have lost, witnessed or processed this much, all at once.