Peanut Butter and Weddings

The first.  The first of anything seems bigger.  We tell ourselves that that there is significance in the firsts, something to be celebrated. First born, first place, first date, first kiss, first salute, first one to open a new jar of peanut butter.  Firsts are often powerful moments or experiences, some of which may change the trajectory of a family, future or fortune.    

Lately though, I find myself thinking more on the Lasts.  Not in a macabre sense, but rather in a competition of meaning.  Those Firsts are indeed amazing.  They are mountaintops.  Goals striven for, interests pursued, desires vindicated, dreams realized…they are delicious, satisfying and fulfilling.  Firsts feel like the progress that newness sometimes delivers.  Jon Acuff coined a phrase that resonates there: “When was the last time you were brave enough to be bad at something new?”  First is seen as brave, progressive, learning, growing…and maybe that’s the difference.  We see them.  We plan for those firsts.  We work for them.  In a time before internet directories, I once called every building at a University Hospital in order to find the proper unit to have flowers delivered to a pretty girl because she knew that the “S” in Harry S. Truman’s name didn’t stand for anything.  They might call that stalking now, I’m not sure.  It turned in to a first date, a first kiss, and if I don’t stop overeating, drinking too much Diet Coke and start working out, a first husband for her.

Big stuff Firsts.

I find myself in a season of Lasts.  I have heard the last words of my father.  I witnessed my father-in-law give a last look and smile to his daughter.  They too are powerful, those Lasts.  The difference is that we rarely see them coming.  We should, but we don’t look for them in the same way.  Somewhere along the way, I took off my uniform for the last time.  I stood in a final formation.  I exchanged a last salute, and neither I nor the Soldier I shared it with had any idea.  Lasts can be planned, but we celebrate fewer of them.  Last day of school.  Last day of work before retirement.  Lasts tend to be a bit sneaky.  They creep up and pass us quietly as if to spare us the emotional collision they would deliver if we recognized them.  In Isaiah, God says “I am the First and I am the Last.”  I’m not sure, even now, that I can fully grasp that, but I find comfort knowing that whether I’m in a First or Last, God is in them both.

I don’t remember the last time my now married son slept under my roof, though I do sort of remember when my car insurance premium dropped.  I now have a daughter getting married.  She is rightly focused on ALL the Firsts coming at her, but perhaps because of her brother, or because she is my first baby girl, I am more conscious of the Lasts.   Will I see them? The last late-night chat?  The last argument that never fully ends because she refuses to see that I’m right?  Hey…this is my post, not hers.  Another daughter now starts a last year of High School and another son ticks Lasts off the list monthly it seems.  My mother now bravely faces Lasts that I think she sees with greater clarity than I am willing to.

Perhaps it is only with the benefit of hindsight and some “mileage” that I come to see the Lasts as more meaningful.  They become the accumulation of all the wild anticipation of the First, the stalwart labor of the sustained, and the eventual realization of the final.  The hands held, tears shed, work done, lips kissed, the tight embraces held.  They are a culmination.  Firsts hold all our hopes, but it’s the Lasts that quietly hold our lives.  

Whatever may come, I am resolved to somehow love the lasts, and still look for firsts.  No matter what happens, there really is always the chance that I get to be the first to open that jar of peanut butter.