re: Do you ever know in the moment that this time is the last time?

What’s that Office quote?

I wish there was a way to know we’re in the good times when we’re actually in them.

Someone should write that down

Last year my nine year old grandaughter fell asleep in my lap during a parade. At the time I thought, “This is probably it.” She’s almost 11 now, and that won’t happen again.

I’ll tell you this, from an old campaigner, you should try to capture those moments, but it won’t stop it all from evanescing. Here is a quote from a novel that you might appreciate…

quote:

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- [ ] So much of parenting was about loss, people said. And she had thought it meant loss of herself, loss of control as your children grew up, loss as they moved out and on with their lives, and certainly there was that. But that wasn’t the real stick of it. You lost those little people that you loved, and you didn’t even know it until suddenly you looked back at a photo or a memory and realized they were gone—absolutely vanished. Time took them. You couldn’t reach out and hold their hands when they were afraid or smooth their brows when they worried. Their hands were something else now—bigger, tougher—their brows pimpled or wrinkled, broader. Poof! They had metamorphosed, and the metamorphosis was not the lovely, benign process you were taught in school, caterpillar to butterfly, but a seemingly sudden erasure and replacement.

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That was by J.K. Rowling from her Strike detective novels.

Rarely. Like tonight, I'll see my daughter cheer at a football game as a middle school cheerleader for the last time. That's something planned that I can point to. If something happens to disrupt that, then we're looking at a different story.

I had this feeling, whether accurate or not, that I wasn’t able or capable of really soaking in all the precious moments with my children, so I’ve been more conscious of that with the grandchildren.

That's me this morning.