Parents usually mark their children’s firsts — first food, first words, first steps — but lasts often slip by unnoticed. I don’t remember the last time I carried my son up the stairs in the crook of my arm. Or the last time I read him a bedtime story, closing the cover of Goodnight Moon when I was done. Or the last time he and I kissed on the lips or crossed the street hand in hand. Or the last time he called me “Daddy.” I don’t remember because I didn’t know it was the last time. Had I known, I would have cherished it more. I would have held on tighter.

Edward Warner
Saxtons River, Vermont

The first time my husband and I danced was at our wedding. Actually, we didn’t dance; we just posed for the camera. During our marriage I twirled around the house while picking up after the kids, but Russell, though he loved music, just wasn’t a dancer. When he was in a playful mood, he sometimes did what he called “sit-down dancing” — staying in his chair and moving his feet to the beat.

The kids grew up and moved away, and Russell and I were making plans for enjoying our retirement when he suddenly fell ill and had to have major surgery. To brighten his hospital stay, I brought him a portable cd player and a few cds.

One evening as visiting hours drew to a close, Russell put in his favorite cd, grabbed my arm, and danced me around his hospital room: our first dance in twenty-five years of marriage. Then he walked me to the elevator, and we kissed good night in an unusual public display of affection.

A few hours later the phone woke me. Russell had died — a hemorrhage of his carotid artery due to a postsurgical infection. Our first real dance had also been our last.

Margaret Cherre
Friendship, New York

Sue and I met in a meditation ashram, where we were assigned to be roommates. That first night in the kitchen after dinner, I was wiping the counter with long, sweeping arcs of my sponge when Sue came by with an armful of dishes. Seeing my careful technique, she said, “You love this, don’t you?”

It was as if she had glimpsed a deeply hidden secret.

We became lovers, and on weekends we would drive into town under the pretense of “shopping,” park on a shaded side street, and make out. We held hands as I drove back but always let go upon entering the ashram’s long driveway: sexual contact wasn’t allowed in the monastic environment.

When we made love at night, we would stifle our moans, though we were sure the devout woman in the single room across the hall was on to us. In retrospect, I think the whole ashram knew. We were protected, however, by the house rule against speaking of our personal lives.

I saw a future for us together, but Sue became progressively more troubled by our love affair. She saw me as a temptation that she had failed to resist.

One weekend in early May, Sue and I rented a house near Provincetown, Massachusetts. On our last night there, she poured a small bowl of olive oil, placed it by the bed, and used it to take me to new heights of ecstasy. Afterward we lay together and stared up at the skylight above us.

“We can’t be lovers anymore,” Sue said firmly.

I said nothing.

“My spiritual practice is the most important thing to me, and celibacy helps me keep my focus,” she explained.

I began to cry, and so did she. Although we lived together, in and out of the ashram, for most of the next decade, that was the last time we made love.

Amy H.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

My father was bigger than life, a tall, broad-shouldered man who could belt out a song at the piano with gusto. He read five newspapers a day while watching two televisions and listening to the radio, all at the same time. There were six of us in our Brooklyn home — my paternal grandparents, my parents, my older brother, and I — but my father was the dominant presence. My first memory is of waking up in his strong arms as he carried me to my crib.

Always a sharp debater and more aware of current events than most teachers, my father had high expectations for me in school. At home he insisted I play the dutiful granddaughter to his ailing parents. Disappointing him was easy. The older I grew, the less acceptable I became. By the time I reached adolescence, my father had become a brooding storm to be avoided. Whenever I heard his car pull up in front of the house, I ran upstairs to my room.

As my father’s once-successful sales career began to decline, his physical and mental health plunged as well. Tension filled our house, and at night I would sit at the top of the stairs and listen to the yelling in Yiddish and English from two flights below, where my parents and grandparents exchanged recriminations.

My brother and I grew up and moved out. After my grandparents died, my parents enjoyed their first year on their own in thirty years of marriage. A peace settled over them, and my mother opened a store in the house.

But their new beginning was short-lived. My father was diagnosed with colon cancer just before his sixtieth birthday. We had cake and opened presents in his hospital room. By then he had shrunk in body and spirit, his booming voice barely a whisper, his yellowed eyes wise and sad.

One day I was feeding him cooked cherries in bed. Like a baby, he opened his mouth for the spoon and swallowed appreciatively. Then he started to choke on a pit. Terrified that I had killed my father, I moved to summon a nurse, but he managed to swallow the pit. I wept to see him breathe and told him I loved him. “Me too,” he whispered.

The next day my father lapsed into a coma, and a week later he died. The last time I saw him, he was unconscious and breathing as rapidly as if he had run a race. The daddy I’d adored, the father I’d feared, and the parent I’d ultimately made peace with were like three different men. I said goodbye to all of them.

After my mother became a widow, she created a new identity for herself, going by her first name only — Rosie — and saying she would no longer be defined by any man. She had some good years, free to find the person she was meant to be without the burden of her in-laws’ and her husband’s needs. My mother and I had always been close and only grew closer as I grew older. She used to say we were “one soul in two bodies.” She buoyed me up when broken marriages weighed me down, and I was the one person to whom she could reveal her true heart. Though we lived many miles apart, we remained “one soul” — until disease took from us what distance couldn’t.

My mother’s mind unraveled in a frightening manner. “Organic brain disease” was the term the doctor used as I stared uncomprehendingly at his kind face. He told me to “find a good home” for her and handed me a brochure, like a road map to a land of confusion and pain.

As my mother declined, she and I lost our connection, and she became hostile toward me, aiming her angry words like missiles. My brother and I moved her first to an independent-living facility, then to a nursing home, and finally to an Alzheimer’s ward, where she became emaciated and haunted. My frequent walks down that ward corridor were the hardest steps I ever took, and I often collapsed against the wall as I left her room.

The last time I saw my mother, she tried to hit me with the one hand she could still move, and she hissed, “Go to hell, you bastard.” I am already there, I thought.

After many years of feeling alienated and uncomfortable around my father, I’d been able to find peace and acceptance with him before the end. After many years of cherished closeness with my mother, I was left with only guilt and misery at her death.

Elyse Crane
Roanoke, Virginia

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