What if this were your last moment with someone?

On grief and guilt

“I only hearted her last message,” my dear friend tells me, through tears.

“I meant to reply. Why didn’t I reply?”

She’s just lost a friend she’s known since she was six years old—her first ever best friend.

I listen, knowing there is not much in the way of comfort we can offer in grief beyond our presence.

After a pause, I tell my friend—who I have known since I was thirteen years old—that she is not the bad friend her grief, mixed with guilt, is making her out to be.

“You’re a treasured, beautiful friend. When you’re there, you’re really there—attentive, curious, supportive.”

And that’s what I believe to be the true measure—not one final act or non-act, but who we were throughout.

Maybe you only hearted the last message, but it’s the hundreds of texts, calls and conversations that came before that count. We are not judged by an imperfect ending, but the entire course of a friendship, a work, a life.

Even if we can get to a place where we allow ourselves such grace, the guilt can still linger. If only, if only, if only.

Guilt is often a wish. After talking with my friend, I was reminded of a scene from the animated film Soul.

Just before the jazz pianist and music teacher Joe Gardner can play his dream gig, he has an accident. Straight after, we see his soul on an other-worldly conveyor belt to the afterlife.

Confused, Joe turns to the other souls and explains he is not supposed to be there: “Wait. I’m not finished. I gotta get back. I don’t wanna die! I’m not done. I’m not done.”

When it’s over, do we all wish for the same thing? One more day. One more chance. One more call?

A tragedy about being a person is that we don’t know when something will be our last.

There’s a hauntingly beautiful poem by Ellen Bass that begins:

What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.

Mostly, other people’s lasts are invisible to us, and even the vast majority of our own pass by us unnoticed. As the adage goes, at some point in your childhood, you and your friends went outside to play together for the last time, and nobody knew it.

Lasts don’t just come to us in death. Connections can fade, shift, and break with and without fanfare.

Reading the poem in its entirety again now, I wonder why I don’t just start each day with it, remembering to treat everything as if it could be the last time.

There’s a last-time meditation popular amongst stoics where you perform an activity as if it’s the last time to feel more present, connected and appreciative. What if this were the last time you washed the dishes? What if this were the last time you visited the country town where your grandparents grew up? What if this were the last time you spent an afternoon sitting around aimlessly with a friend?

Maybe even the things we might usually veer from, we’d linger if we knew it was the last time. As Michael Singer writes in The Untethered Soul:

“Imagine a person in a hospital bed who has just been told they have a week to live - if it were raining outside, they would want to feel the rain just once more. For them, that would be the most precious thing. But you don’t want to feel the rain. You run and cover up.”

Meditating on our lasts can help us appreciate just how spectacular it is that we are all here, in this world, on this day.

But I also think it would be an unrealistic expectation for the human mind to make it a sole preoccupation. We only have so much time, energy, attention. Things will inevitably pass by unnoticed because the majority of things do.

Even if we were intention about every single moment, our days are composed of choices and trade-offs. We have less control over any one outcomes than we like to think—we cannot blame or congratulate ourselves too much either way.

Maybe we’ll regret prioritising a work project over going on a trip with friends; or maybe we won’t. Doing the reverse could be just as true. We just don’t know.

Acknowledging how little we know allows us to give space to our grief, while also alleviating needless guilt that comes through the unforgiving lens of hindsight.

Rather than thinking about our impermanence all the time, such wisdom often appears to us in flashes that are in part dazzling because of their spontaneous and limited appearance.

I’m reminded of what writer George Saunders described as an ‘airport state of mind’ in an episode of Longford Podcast.

“… You know when you are saying goodbye to someone you love at the airport and you get all soft? You’re like, “Oh my god, I hardly knew ya?” You know that feeling? What if that’s the truth? That, times ten, is the mode that we should exist in all the time.”

That mode of full presence, of dazzling aliveness, comes in waves. As Saunders continues, other days, we are just habitually ourselves, and there is a big gap between the airport state of mind and our everyday state of mind.

What we can do is work to narrow that gap as best we can, adds Saunders:

“… my regret would be how much time did I spend in a regular old stupid habitual mindset taking everything for granted versus this exalted state of being tenderised to the people you care about…”

When we are in this exalted, tender state, is perhaps the time to act on wishes we find ourselves delaying—the dinner party you’ve been meaning to organise, the trip you’ve been meaning to take, the call you’ve thought about.

And then, when such a state passes as all things pass, we must remember we are human, and to be human is to err. We will rush through things, we will forget, we will be imperfect, we will take people for granted, we will be preoccupied and too busy. We will regret, we will grieve, we will feel guilty. And we will learn.

The thing is, there is always more we could have done or wished we had done. It’s difficult, it’s painful, it’s inevitable.

Guilt, held too long, only clouds our ability to see the learning and appreciate what is in front of us now. Perhaps the best thing we can do is put it aside so we can move forward with the grief, and savour our moments together as best we can.

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Many thanks to editor Susie Thatcher of Mysterious Realm for your keen eye on the draft.

For more of my writing, you can peruse the archive and explore my other newsletter, On Things where I share daily observations.

With fondness & friendship,
Madeleine