Make The Last Time Count

I was vacuuming the house today when a strange thought occurred to me.

What if this is the last time I ever clean this house?

I don't mean because I'm planning to die tomorrow. Nothing so dramatic. I mean there will eventually be a last time for everything, and almost none of us will know when we're doing something for the last time.

There will be a last time you mow the lawn. A last time you change the sheets. A last time you drive a familiar road. A last time you make your favorite dinner. A last time you complain about having to clean the bathroom.

And one day, there will be a last time I clean this house.

Once the thought got into my head, something changed.

I had already vacuumed and was steam mopping the floors, doing what I usually do to get the place reasonably presentable. But suddenly, reasonably presentable didn't seem good enough.

So I polished the legs of the piano.

Nobody has played that piano in 15 years. There was absolutely no practical reason its legs needed polishing today. But there I was, rubbing the wood and thinking about all the years this piano has sat in this house, collecting dust and memories in roughly equal measure.

I gathered up the dishrags I'd left lying around and put them where they belonged. I polished some wood I'd been meaning to take care of since spring. I lit a few extra candles. I went outside, cut some flowers, put them in a vase, and set them on the mantel.

I had podcasts playing in the background. The vacuum had been put away. The floors were drying. And I kept thinking about this strange possibility.

They never tell you when it's the last time.

That's the part I can't stop thinking about.

We tend to believe our lives are made up of big events. The wedding. The retirement. The trip to Europe. The new house. The diagnosis. The funeral. The birthday with the zero at the end.

But most of a life happens between those things.

It happens while you're folding towels.

It happens while you're making coffee.

It happens while you're polishing the legs of a piano nobody plays anymore.

We spend so much time treating ordinary life as filler. We rush through Tuesday because nothing important is happening Tuesday. We clean the kitchen because we have to. We call our mother because we haven't called in a while. We kiss someone goodbye without thinking about the kiss because we're already thinking about where we need to be next.

Then, eventually, one of those completely ordinary moments turns out to have been the last one.

The last Christmas with everyone around the table.

The last walk with the dog.

The last time Dad called.

The last time you slept beside someone.

The last time you were strong enough to carry your own suitcase up the stairs.

The strange thing is, if somebody told us beforehand, we'd behave completely differently.

If someone said, "This is the last time you're going to sit on this porch with your best friend," you wouldn't be checking your phone.

If someone said, "This is the last dinner all of you will have together," you wouldn't care if the potatoes were cold.

And if someone told me, "Nick, this is the last time you're ever going to clean this house," apparently I'd polish the piano.

There's something funny about that.

I don't want a clean house to be my legacy. God forbid anyone stands at my funeral and says, "You should have seen his immaculate bimmaculate!"

But I do want there to be evidence that I cared.

About my home. About the people who entered it. About the things I chose to surround myself with. About making a place feel loved rather than merely occupied.

Maybe that's why those flowers on the mantel suddenly mattered.

They'll be dead in a few days. Nobody needed them there. They didn't increase the value of the house or accomplish anything measurable.

They simply made the room nicer for the people living in it.

And maybe that's enough.

I think age changes your relationship with "someday." When you're young, someday seems inexhaustible. There will always be another summer, another Christmas, another trip, another chance to call, another afternoon to get around to polishing the damn piano.

Eventually you understand that someday has a limited inventory.

That doesn't have to make life frightening or sad. I think it does the opposite.

It makes a Thursday evening worth paying attention to.

It makes flowers worth cutting.

It makes the people sitting across from you worth looking at for another second before you turn back toward your phone.

It makes you want to take care of things.

So I finished cleaning the house.

Maybe I'll clean it hundreds more times. I hope so. I'm sure I'll return to half-assing it soon enough. There will be days when the dishrags stay where I dropped them and the piano legs collect another respectable layer of dust.

But today I cleaned differently. Not because I thought I was dying. Because I remembered I was living.

And I wanted there to be some evidence that I noticed.