It is almost certainly simply a symptom of advancing years and the fact that everyone you know is also suffering from that particular aspect of life. It is inevitable that for those who have managed to get this far there are more years in our past than in our future – and therefore plenty of things that we will never do or encounter again. When I posted This Could Be The Last Time… there was a certain irony in thinking that there would be further times which “could be the last time” 😂
The major problem is, of course, that when pondering on this it becomes pretty clear that the most important word of the title is ‘Could’. It is almost impossible to say with certainty that ‘this is the last time’ and I guess we should be thankful about that.
The particular thing that got me to writing this post was the fact that sometimes you come across circumstances where a potential ‘last time’ is, for one reason or another, missed. Those who know a little about my recent past will recall that to celebrate a ‘big’ birthday in some meaningful (to me) way I embarked on my ’70-for-70′ project – reconnecting with people. Some I was still in frequent contact anyway but I wanted them to be part of the 70; some I had only infrequent communication with; and some were people I hadn’t connected with in years.
The last group were, of course, the most challenging to get in touch with. I generated a list of people that ‘should’ be in the 70 – which in itself was a pretty arbitrary number – and some detective work followed 🙂! In some cases I failed to find a way to try and contact them. Two spring immediately to mind and are the primary catalysts for this post. One simply popped into a ‘contactable’ space after I had almost given up – and it was lovely to reconnect – the other, for a long time, remained ‘unfindable’ until I finally got a breakthrough and a possible way to make contact with them.
Thanks to a year filled with other things I didn’t immediately follow up on the connection – in this case I had not had any contact with him for almost 40 years – so I wanted to be able to properly converse when we did finally meet again. If there was one thing that I found during the ’70-for-70′ project it was that being ‘in contact’ with people is actually time consuming and deserving of full attention. So it wasn’t until now that I tried to follow through on the connection. Message sent. Then a search on the internet followed because I remembered that I had seen a relatively recent video of him.
It found the video – and an obituary – he had passed away on New Year’s day. This last contact with him had been missed. It would be easy to think ‘if only’ – I could have messaged him last year. However, the reality is that I didn’t so the memories were not brought to mind by a reconnection – but they have, to some extent, been brought to mind by missing the opportunity to reconnect. I won’t ever know whether I was part of his thoughts at any time in all the years – in many ways I would expect not, but I know that he certainly would not have forgotten who I was.
This is not the first ‘missed last time’ and probably will not be the last! With another friend who passed a few years ago I also had a last opportunity to connect with – although in this case we had been in touch not long beforehand – it was just a one last chance that I chose not to take – I didn’t know that I was missing a ‘last time’. The two friendships here illustrate how diverse links between people can be – in one case we have someone I spent a lot of time with many years ago and then almost completely severed the connection and in the other is someone I spent a lot of time with many years ago that I had continued to be in intermittent contact with ever since.
What this strengthens is the desire to avoid the missed last time situations and the need to take the opportunity to make things ‘just once more’ in case it does turn into the last time – the last opportunity to do something or to connect with someone. Actually – one more chance to generate memories – which in the end are what we have left.
One irony is that no matter how hard we try it is almost impossible to actually know when something actually is happening for the last time. It would be really annoying to treat everything “as if” it is the last time – I am sure that everyone would get pretty fed up with that 😉 – however what we should try to do (perhaps) is simply to avoid making a decision to NOT do something simply because it is inconvenient or awkward or whatever. Some of those things we would later look back on and think – “I wish I had …” and we would have missed making those memories.