Firsts and Lasts
Earlier this week, a simple errand brought on both tears and an epiphany. What should have been a simple stop at the grocery story turned into so much more.
You see, I had to stop and buy peanut butter. My daughter packs a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to bring to school for lunch every day. Much like her mother, she is a creature of routine and habit. As such, the same way she enjoyed a nice PB&J for lunch in kindergarten, it is still an easy and comforting lunch for her all these years later. And with one week left of school, I had used the last of the peanut butter the night before, so had to buy more so that I could make sure she had her preferred lunch for this last week of school.
And here is where a simple trip to the store turned into something much bigger.
This “last week of school” is carrying a lot more weight than any previous academic year. Because at the completion of this academic year, she is graduating high school.
And… my daughter is the only person in the house who eats peanut butter. So this jar of peanut butter… might be the last I buy. Which I realized as I reached to pull it from the shelf. And that realization hit me like a ton of bricks.
Over the course of our lives, we have countless milestones. At the beginning, those milestones are generally “firsts” - first smile. First step. First day of school. First dance. Even as we grow older and progress through our lives, the firsts keep coming. First kiss. First job. First apartment. First car… Firsts are a really big deal.
But as we grow, we also begin to have milestones that are “lasts” - last day of elementary school. Last day of middle school. Last time having to ask our parents for a ride.
It’s all too easy to think of the “firsts” as joyful and the “lasts” as sad or scary. After all, it is the end of an era, a change in our routine… it can often feel like a loss or like being forced out of our comfort zone.
But, the truth is, as we are reminded in the lyric from the 1998 song “Closing Time” by Semisonic, “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
Some lasts we don’t see coming, especially from a parenting perspective - the last time our child asks us to cut up their food or the last time we carefully carry their little sleeping bodies from the car to their bed. We don’t know it is a last in the moment, we can only realize it by the lack of its recurrence later.
And this isn’t limited to parenting lasts. We can’t always know when the last time we will see someone is, when the last time we will hear their voice or see their smile. We can’t know, in any moment, if this is the last time we will hear that particular song or see that kind of bird flying in the sky.
No matter whether we know it’s coming or not, these lasts deserve to be honored and celebrated just as we have cherished the firsts in our lives. These lasts are proof of experience, indeed of our own existence. They are evidence of our growth and our journey. They are reminders and memories of experiences gained and lessons learned.
Moreso, every last - a rightful and special milestone in its own right - also opens up new opportunities for more firsts. So maybe rather than bracing ourselves for lasts, steeling ourselves for some potential or inevitable loss, maybe we can celebrate them as a part of the cycle of our lives, and continue to look forward to new firsts that we don’t even know to anticipate.
So as I approach this milestone in my daughter’s life (the graduation, not the peanut butter… or… maybe both. That works, too…), I am grateful for every first (and middle) that has brought us to this last, and so very excited for all of the future firsts that lay ahead. For all of us.
Man… Who knew how insightful a jar of peanut butter could be?