I realized the other day that at some point I picked my daughter up and held her for the last time. I lifted her off the ground as a child and then it never happened again.
I don’t have the faintest recollection of when that might have been. Sometime in elementary school I would imagine. But that moment did not register in my memory and now it’s lost forever.
That thought makes my heart feel as though it’s melting onto the floor of my stomach.
It’s funny how significant final events in our lives can be washed away with a sea of other seemingly routine events. Something so special deserves more recognition, but it gets devalued as being a routine event.
Sometimes we see these events coming and recognize them as a capstone. When I played my last high school football game for Marysville, I knew it would be the last time I played. I had the ability to keep playing after high school, but I knew my heart wasn’t in it. So every snap of the football on Oct. 27, 1989 was another tick of the clock counting down the end of my football career. Because I saw the game as an ending, I was able to store away a lot of memories from that night.
A lot of times the realization of a final event is lost because you just assume it will occur again. For example, I can’t tell you the last time I rode a bicycle. When I was in elementary, middle and even early high school, I rode my bike all over town. Then I got a driver’s license and became too cool for a bike. That continued on into early adulthood and I simply never rode again, not even with my daughter. I wonder, when was the last time that I rode my bike home, put it in the shed, and then never went out there to get it again. There is always the possibility that I might choose to ride again someday, perhaps for exercise, so its hard to consider my biking days truly over.
However, there is a final event approaching that I would like to appreciate. Someday I will play my last slowpitch softball game. I have participated in the sport since I was 18-years-old, essentially molding my summers around when and where I would be playing. But in recent years, as age and aches began to accumulate, I began to play much less. I still play occasionally, in nearby leagues or charity tournaments, but someday I will play my last game and I probably won’t even know it. I’ll hang up my gear at the end of the year and expect someone to call me for a tournament the next summer. But that call won’t come, that year or the next and I’ll be finished with the game, without even knowing it. It’s the assumption of another go-round that robs us from truly taking stock of what we left behind.
I’m sure when Grace was little and jumped up into my arms I probably exaggerated a groan and told her that she was getting too heavy to pick up – even though that wasn’t the case. But the next day she didn’t jump up, nor the one after. I’m sure I didn’t even notice it at the time. I probably thought she would leap up into my arms again some time. But she never did.
So the recollection of the last time I ever lifted my daughter up into my arms is now lost, having slipped away with so many other memories that weren’t appreciated at the time. Taken for granted at the time as just being another piece of “life,” I wish I had the memories of all the things that never happened again.
-Chad Williamson is the managing editor at the Journal-Tribune.