This is the Last Time
You never know when the last time comes
You don’t know when goodbye really means goodbye.
I remember a wedding recently where I hadn’t seen so many friends for a decade or so. None of us knew that the last time we said goodbye it would be for so long, but I think leaving that evening we realised it would likely be the last time for a good while.
You never know if this is the last time that you will do something that seems so normal.
This isn’t a “live every day as if it is your last” bit. Things change.
It is because we have a finite number of experiences that they are enjoyable, though we often don’t think of it this way.
If we had infinite Christmases, or infinite bedtime stories with our kids, then we might enjoy them a little bit less.
Or maybe we don’t even consider that in the moment, when they’re mundane or even inconvenient. When we’re imagining being somewhere else or when we are somewhere else, scrolling through social media rather than being fully present. We don’t imagine that one day we will long to have one more bedtime story, or pint with a friend.
Of course, we don't think selectively about what qualifies to eat our time. We don't think of the opportunity cost of time.
If we had infinite experiences maybe we would learn how to do them better, or maybe they would be so pointless that it wouldn’t make a difference.
一期一会
There’s an old Japanese idiom, ichi-go ichi-e, a yojijukugo which translates as one time, one meeting and implores you to give respect to your host as though it were a meeting that could only occur once in a lifetime.
Suggesting this level of ceremony would have been laughed at in the dining rooms and kitchens of my grandparents, but as you get older you realise a thing or two.
You might have seen the Twitter thread from Sahil Bloom. The moment he realised that if he only stuck to seeing his parents once a year then he probably only has 15 more visits left.
And that’s 15 visits with possibly decreasing quality of life and assuming they stay healthy enough in the meantime.
Often it isn’t easy to make visits happen more often. Life is good at getting in the way.
Ichi-go ichi-e makes me think about the things that change, and the things that never change, in between these Christmas meals or birthday occasions.
We change our minds through every experience, every book, every relationship. If you’re lucky enough to have eight people coming together for your Christmas dinner then that’s a lot of experiences to change the context going into that dinner.
But sometimes things feel like they don’t change at all, which I guess is why we’re tricked into believing they never will.
I think it’s more of a modern issue as it becomes so easy - and likely - for people to move away from their family and where they were raised.
If you’ve had to spend hundreds and travel for hours to make it back for a party the sacrifice is better understood than if you’ve been sat at home waiting and wondering why they’re fifteen minutes late.
If you have grown up in a nuclear family with grandparents, aunties, and uncles all in the same town, I think maybe it’s hard to process something so different.
It’s certainly harder for traditions to continue at distance.
New Traditions
I’ve wanted to address the importance of tradition and ritual more in this series, and at some point I will, but I want to talk about them a bit in this context.
My great Taid (Welsh word for grandfather) on my mother’s side celebrated his birthday on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas Day for any non-Brits). Anyone with birthdays on Boxing Day or around Christmas will tell you this is bad news, but I think it gets better as you get older.
It was a great tradition creator in our family. Every Boxing Day we would visit their house nearby, and extend the festivities for another day.
When he passed in 2006 there was quite a void, but we started a new tradition. Every Boxing Day we would go for a riverside walk in Llangollen, near the home that they raised their kids (my Nana) in.
In 2013, after his surviving wife, my great Nana, passed away, we further secured the tradition, by adding a plaque to the bench nearest the old house and that we ended our walk at, and added in a swig of whiskey from an old hip flask.
Now, every year we all make time to come together to have that walk between Christmas and New Year. Family from all over gather, to pay tribute and to have that moment.
It might be a different group every year, but it is no longer just about honouring Raymond and Queenie. It’s about honouring our surviving family and the future, and the finite moments that we have to gather and recognise these occasions.
The tradition gives it further clout, which means that more people are likely to commit and participate.
We didn’t discuss it as a tradition, it emerged and then it was about encapsulating it and doing everything we could to make sure it was repeated annually, come rain or light rain.
These traditions normally have some consistent elements, I’ll definitely talk more about that in the future, but one of the most important is place.
This is Not My Beautiful House
The place is a vital part of a tradition.
A house isn’t just a building. We don’t value them just on the materials used.
If you’ve ever been to a grandparents’ home after they’ve passed you realise how much of your memories locked into that space are taken for granted. When small, insignificant items hold deeply locked memories which were living in the dusty corners of your mind.
We don’t know when we walk into that room for the last family dinner, or birthday party, or late night waiting for positive news from the hospital.
It would feel strange to document that room, to walk around and take pictures of the pictures on the walls, the carpet’s pattern, the books in the bookcase.
The first time you walk into a building after a person has permanently left it can feel, well, empty.
If you walk in after those trinkets go - those things that if you were asked to paint a picture of the room you would forget to include but when you walk in you’re painfully aware of their absence - it feels less like the place.
The joy of the place is as much about the company you have, but they all overlap and contribute to our single memory of a fleeting moment in our lives.
Funerals
I’ve been to more funerals this year than I have in the last decade combined. It’s not great.
Funerals are strange things, maybe this is a very British thing but we get together in a church, chapel, or crematorium, have a ceremony of varying levels of sincerity and personalisation, and then head to a pub or social club for a beige buffet and beer or two.
It never feels like much of an honouring of that person.
I want to try something different at the next funeral I attend. I want to leave cards with questions on the tables which ask what they remember about the person who has passed.
What was their favourite song? Who was their favourite team? What made them angry? When were they really embarrassed? When did you ever see them cry?
We all have these memories that we never surface (apart from maybe those late nights when you can’t sleep nor control the randomness that becomes urgent) but never have chance to share.
We have this amazing gathering of people who are uniquely able to honour the memory of the person who has passed.
The funeral is the last time you will have this diverse set of folks altogether in one place. It’s like a solar system and the person who passed away is the main gravitational pull. Friends who would never meet, distant cousins, ex-husbands.
There are so many of these stories that are the soul of that person. The soul is the imprint on our minds and hearts that persists.
For some people it might be what they do in the world, the buildings they build, the companies they start, the families they raise.
But for every person it is what they do to our hearts and our memories that outlive the mortal self.
I’ve mentioned the Margaret Atwood poem about souls before.
We create a soul through the memories we create in the company of loved ones.
But sometimes the best stories come from how we react to something embarrassing, silly, or melodramatic. Those “do you remember when…?” stories that are tinged in shame but not mockery. The time she fell in the stream, the time he got ketchup all over his shirt, the time they didn’t turn the oven on and left the turkey in the cold ruining Christmas dinner.
But it wasn’t ruined, nobody starved, and it made a humorous tale for every Christmas to come.
I think there’s something in our defences that sap these precious memories from happening, none of us ever want to look silly.
I’m going to write more one day about how it seems like it’s become impossible to live a normal life. We all have personal brands to protect nowadays.
Maybe if we were all a little more vulnerable and humble we would have more embarrassing stories to tell at funerals.
Next Christmas
What are your plans for Christmas?
What are you going to do to create embarrassing memories, honour traditions, and value what might be one of your last ten Christmases with people you cherish?
Thanks for letting me vent.