We care about the last time.

The last time your kid walks home from elementary school. He’s moving on to junior high.

The last time you walk out of the job you’ve had for 20 years. You’re going back to college.

The last time you have chemo. You ring a bell and learn you are in remission.

Sometimes we know it’s the last time. Sometimes we know it’s the last time and we are looking forward to a promising first time. In some cases, this is bittersweet.

Sometimes we don’t know it’s the last time. Sometimes the last time doesn’t lead to a promising first time.

The last time your dad with Alzheimer’s eats a meal without assistance.

The last time your loved one with Lewy-Body goes for her daily walk around the neighborhood.

The last time Grandpa is able to travel for three hours to see his grandkids.

A friend of mine had a last time a few months back. The last time her dad called her by her name.

She visited him at the nursing home. He was having what she considered to be a good day. He was more cognitively aware than he had been in a while, and he seemed to be entertaining himself with bad jokes.

More than a few times, he looked at his daughter and said her name intensely. He would get her attention and she’d look at him. But then he had nothing to say. My friend found that to be odd, but didn’t think much of it.

She went on vacation. During that week, he likely had a small stroke. When she went to visit him, he was struggling with speech and didn’t seem to recognize her. He didn’t call her by her name.

That was months ago. She now recognizes that the day her dad said her name several times in such a powerful way was the last time he would call her by name. She wonders if somehow he knew he’d lose the ability to call her by name in the next few days, and he wanted to call her by her name as much as possible.

You usually don’t know it’s the last time when it comes to dementia.

Often times people are telling a story and will stop and say something like, “I guess that was Dad’s last plane ride,” or “I think that was the last time Grandpa was able to go to one of the grandkid’s games.”

We usually think there’s going to be another time. Another vacation. Another basketball game. And at some point, there’s not.

I read something recently that has stuck with me:

Everything ends and that’s okay.

I’ve thought about this in terms of my capability to run a marathon (too many back surgeries), friendships, my favorite vacuum that bit the dust (is that a pun?), and life in general.

I don’t know if I feel okay about life ending. But life might lose its meaning if we live forever. And the world would be crowded. We’d have to cut down all the trees to build houses. But how would we build houses (and other things) without trees?

So maybe it is okay that we die.

We think about last words and last breaths. But we also think about other types of last times.

And with dementia, there are a lot of last times.