The last time: Day 2

I joined a support group on Facebook for bloggers who are doing NaBloPoMo, and today was my day to suggest a prompt to the group. I chose this one: Write about a last time that you didn't know would be the last. I've been thinking a lot about last times over the past couple of months.

The last time I talked to my mom on the phone she had called to tell me my cousin, two years older than me, had died. We didn't talk long. I was fixing dinner and she was watching one of her shows, but we promised we'd talk longer soon.

The last time I saw her before her final stroke was when I was home for her birthday party, which I wrote about yesterday. I'm grateful for that. It was a practically perfect trip, but if I'd known it was the last time .... I can't really think of anything I'd have done different.

Mostly over the past couple of months I've thought about the last times I am aware of. Cleaning out Mom's house and knowing it was not only the last time I'd sit at her kitchen table, but possibly the last time I'd go home. Funny how I couldn't wait to leave that little town in SW Iowa when I was 17, but it never stopped being home to me. 

And so overlying the grief of my mom's death has been this second shadow of grief over the things I'll probably never do again in my hometown.

I'll never scoop the loop uptown. Back when gas was a quarter we spent hours riding around, and many of those hours were spent circling that square with the county courthouse in the center. I'm told the kids are no longer allowed to scoop the loop. The police make them turn off if they go around too often. I call bullshit, but I don't live there. And the square that used to be so busy isn't any more anyway. The grocery store and dime stores are gone. A chain grocery store and cheap discount store stand where the high school used to be, a few blocks from the square. And there's even a Dollar Store on the edge of town. I tell myself scooping the loop was already a memory that couldn't really be relived anyway.

There are other things I'll never do again. Take Coraline to the park to play on the horse swings I played on when I was a little girl. Drive by the house I grew up in, which looks about a third the size it used to. Visit my parents' and grandparents' graves. Not that I did that much anyway. They live in my heart, not in the cemetery. I'll never go back to the Methodist church that formed my liberal beliefs. Never pick up the Adair County Free Press and read names of people I knew decades ago. It was bought out by a corporate publisher who fired all the local reporters and doesn't print local news anyway. 

I'll never go out drinking again with my friends from high school who still live in the area. Not that we have over the decades anyway. Most of my trips home were brief and spent with family. Still, I wish we'd been able to go out one more time and get crazy at the bars. We keep in touch on Facebook. I guess that will have to be enough.

I'll never wonder again if I'll ever run into that old boyfriend. You know. That one. The one who wasn't really a very good boyfriend, but I loved him and for a while I believed him when he said we'd get married after he graduated from college. I hear some news about him from time to time, but I haven't talked to him since I told him I was getting married ... to someone else. I think he's had a good life though, and probably never thinks about me anyway. Still, a girl can't help wondering what it would be like ....

I'll never stop by the Tiger's Den, which was called Dunk's the three years I worked there in high school, for an ice cream cone. I learned a strong work ethic there, and I can still cook a mean burger and polish the hell out of some stainless steel.

I'll never drive out to the Nodaway Lake and park at the top of Reefer Hill and .... nevermind. I don't do that any more. Or lie on the hood of a car wondering how many stars are shining over me. I can't see stars here in the city, or not many. I can read a newspaper in my backyard from all the ambient light around me here. I miss the dark and the stars and the quiet of the water at that little lake where my grandfather helped dam the river when he was a young man.

All these years I've felt tethered to that small town, that one square mile, even though I didn't go back that often and I never stayed that long and a lot has changed there over the years. But now I feel like something has been severed. It's still home, but it's not. When I drove through town and headed toward I-80 on highway 92 just two and a half weeks ago, it may have been the last time I will ever drive past the hospital on the edge of town where I was born. So many lasts.

I'm not sure there's much difference between knowing it could be the last time and not knowing. It's just life, and as the Buddha tells us, we can't hold on. There are times in our lives when the impermanence of every single fucking thing hits us harder than usual though, and that's where I'm at. I know time will soften the edges of this grief, but for now, I carry it inside me and give it the space it will take whether I want it or not.

Do you have any last times to share? Did you know it would be the last?