Entry 033: The Last Time
You never know when it is the last time.
That is the thing about it. The last time does not announce itself. It does not wear different clothes. It looks exactly like all the other times, ordinary and unhurried, and then it is gone and you only recognize it from the other side, looking back, when the door has already closed.
The last time my kids jumped on my bed at seven thirty in the morning. I remember the weight of them, the chaos of small bodies and tangled blankets and voices too loud for that hour. I remember wanting five more minutes of sleep. I did not know I was inside a moment I would spend years wishing I could return to. One morning it just stopped. They got older. The door stayed closed. No one announced that the game was over.
The last time I fell asleep beside them. Not because it was bedtime ritual but because the day had emptied all of us and we just collapsed together, breathing in a small pile, the television still murmuring in the other room. I do not know which night was the last one. I would give a great deal to know. Not to change it. Just to have been awake enough to feel it while it was happening.
The last time you walk hand in hand with someone. The last time you kiss them and it still means what it used to mean. The last time I walked out of a KAC hockey game as a teenager, the arena still ringing, not knowing I would never be back in that standing section again. The last time I played for the Tatonkas at the University of Vienna, legs still fast enough to believe they always would be. The last time I held a Maggie Award, which will never happen again because they shut the awards down with the collapse of an entire industry. The last time you close the door to a house you lived in. The last time you eat at the table that held a thousand ordinary dinners. The last time you walk the trail in the neighborhood you are about to leave and will never return to. Nineteen moves. I have closed a lot of doors. Each time I thought I would remember the moment. I almost never did. You are too busy carrying boxes to notice you are carrying grief.
The last time I saw my father when he was still himself. Not the last visit. The last time he was fully there, laughing at something, being the man I had known for forty years, before the hospital and the machines and the slow mechanical process of leaving. I did not know that afternoon was the one I would carry. I thought there would be more afternoons. There always seem to be more, until there are not.
The last time I heard my grandfather's voice. I cannot hear it anymore. I have tried. It is gone. The face stays. The hands stay. The voice is the first thing that leaves, and once it goes, nothing brings it back.
I am writing this from Austria.
I drove past the house I grew up in this week. Viktring. My kids were in the car. Where there used to be a hedge surrounding the property there is now a bare ugly fence. The house has changed. Different windows. Different paint. Different people inside. It was sold during the pandemic and I was not there for the selling. The room I grew up in is gone. The kitchen where my mother cooked is someone else's kitchen. The yard where I played is behind a fence I do not recognize.
Before the fence. When the hedge was still ours.
My kids looked at the house and they were sad too. They commented on the ugly fence. They remembered the hedge. They remembered visiting. For a moment the three of us sat in the car looking at a building that used to be ours.
I always thought I would buy it back. That somewhere in twenty-six years in California I would land the right job at the right time and come home with enough to undo the selling. Fix the hedge. Put the kitchen back. Sit in my old room and let the walls remember me. That never happened.
Klagenfurt is a city I know deep down and do not recognize anymore. Like walking through a dream you have already had. Spektakel is gone. Kamot is gone. The bars where I had my first drink at sixteen, where I practiced being a grown-up before I had any right to, closed years ago. The main street gave up its character to the City Arkaden, a mall that looks like every other mall in every other mid-sized European city. The people on the street are not my people. They are a generation that grew up into this town after I left it. I walk past them and they do not see a man who used to live here. They see a visitor.
My mother lives five minutes from the house. Her apartment is her home and it is warm and it is hers. It does not feel like mine. Your mother's home is not your home. Your home was the house with the hedge and the kitchen and the room. Those are gone. No apartment, however close, replaces the architecture of the place where you became yourself.
Some of my cousins still live here. Some feel the same as they did twenty-six years ago, as if I never left. Some feel like people I used to know. Not because anyone did anything wrong. Because twenty-six years is long enough to become a different person and short enough to remember being the old one.
Only people who have lost their home feel this one. Not people who moved. People who lost it. The house sold. The bars closed. The street changed. You go back and the coordinates are the same and the city has the same name and the Alps are still in the same place and nothing is where you left it.
The kids do not jump on the bed anymore. My father does not answer the phone. The house I grew up in has a fence where the hedge used to be. The bars where I learned to be young are closed. The houses I lived in hold other people's furniture now. The trails I walked belong to other walkers. The hands I held are holding other hands.
But something happened in the car that I did not expect. My kids remembered the hedge. They remembered visiting. They looked at the fence and were sad about it. Not because I told them to be. Because the house meant something to them too. Whatever I thought had disappeared did not fully disappear. It moved. Different people carrying the same memory on a different afternoon, looking at the same spot and feeling the weight of what used to be there.
That is how things survive. Not by staying the same. By landing in someone else.
The Panini albums on my shelf. The ticket stub from Florence. The KAC scarf. My grandfather's jokes that I tell my own kids now without thinking about where I learned them. The way I cook the one dish my mother taught me. These are not souvenirs. They are transfers. Small things carrying weight from one version of a life to the next.
I have been thinking about the way I live. I will be honest about it. I live in the future or I live in the past. The present is the place I move through on my way to somewhere else. Work starts Monday. I cannot wait until Friday. Friday comes and I am already thinking about summer. Everyone does this. We treat five percent of our lives as the destination and the other ninety-five percent as the commute. We get through the month so we can enjoy the weekend. We get through the year so we can take the trip. The trip ends and the cycle starts again.
I do not think this is a way to live. I think it is a way to miss your life while you are inside it.
The last time is not a concept. It is happening constantly. Right now someone is seeing a glacier for the last time before it calves into the sea. Right now a species is occupying a stretch of shoreline it will not return to. Right now the ice is holding a shape it will not hold again. Nobody is marking the moment. Nobody is saying this is it, pay attention, this will not happen again.
That is what Ghosts of the Ice is about. The paintings disappear with heat. They come back when they cool. But the glacier does not come back. The house does not come back. The hedge does not come back. The voice does not come back. The pigment returns when the frame cools. Everything else just leaves.
This entry is being written from a small B&B in Viktring with a view of the Tremischerteich, the place where a lot of legendary hockey was played. My kids are here. The Arctic is nine days away. I am not looking backward anymore. I am just trying to notice what is in front of me before it changes.
“Memory is the space in which a thing happens for the second time.”
