Last Saturday night, my daughter was crying about a headache before she fell asleep on the window seat next to her uneaten pizza. She just needs to catch up on sleep, I thought, as I scooped her up to carry her to bed. But halfway up the stairs, she whispered, “I’m hungry.” I obediently turned around and delivered her to the dining table.

After she’d had her fill, my husband offered to carry her back upstairs to bed. I followed after, where I had a good view of her expression at the side of my husband’s neck: mostly snug with a hint of smug. She’s almost too big now to carry around like a high-density koala, and she knows it. But she’s still wonderfully cuddly and the “up up” requests are growing rarer. Whenever I acquiesce to one, I engage my core just like a middle-aged woman who really doesn’t want to injure herself should, and I make it work.

Smiling at her, I suddenly wondered, When was the last time I carried her brother like that, up in my arms? I couldn’t begin to remember.

Nor can I remember the last time I woke up multiple times overnight to the sound of his crying.

Nor can I remember the last time I watched him fall asleep in my arms in his cozy sleep sack after nursing, before I slyly repositioned my hands, before I oh so gradually lowered him to the smooth, cottony surface of his crib mattress, his asleep-ness intact, before I deftly slid my hands out from under his warm back and fuzzy head, and then just stayed there standing for a moment—to gaze at my handiwork, look for the subtle rise and fall of his chest, and marvel at the perfectly full moon of his sleeping face.

For nights on end, I did all of that. There must have been a night I did it for the last time. After all, he was now away on a sleepover at a friend’s house.

In private and in public, we are primed to notice, if not celebrate, so many firsts: first word (see P.P.S. below), first kiss, first man on the moon. We live in a world that seems to revere beginnings and acknowledge endings mostly when we expect a bridge to another new beginning. Graduating from high school? Congrats, you’re off to college! Finished with college? Hurray, you’re off to the real world! Retiring from a four-decade career with a well-funded pension? Woohoo, you’re now free to really go follow your bliss or travel or spend time with grandchildren or give back or, hey, become a coach! The last day of December? For auld lang syne, then in with the new!

What about the lasts? Not the highly public lasts of famous people on screen, court, or stage, but the private, personal lasts in your life or mine. The surprising and the unsurprising lasts. The lasts we can’t wait for and the ones we can’t bear to imagine. The lasts that would require us to acknowledge that there will be, and have already been, countless lasts (and losses) in our mortal lives.

How do we even begin to confront what we have lost and grown out of? Then again, how else do we begin to see what we have and what we are growing into?

It’s probably some combination of my midlife-ness and my relationship to loss that has me wondering so much about lasts. At each gathering with extended family (like the one we just had over Thanksgiving), I wonder, Is this the last one like this? Two years ago, while trying not to get carsick on the winding mountain road from the cloud forests of Costa Rica to the airport for our flight home after having spent a year living there, I wondered, Is this my last time here? Every time I help my daughter trim her nails, I wonder, How many more chances do I have to do this for her?

It’s easier by far to focus on firsts. Lasts can be hard to see without an intentional act of retrospection, and they often require that we be willing to grieve. But my sense is that being more attuned to endings generally, and lasts specifically, gives us a deeper, more appreciative way to pay attention and bear witness to the substance of our lives.

We like to focus on where to begin and how to start the next thing. But first, we need to know where we are now. To recognize where we are now, we have to discern how far we’ve come. And to do that, we must somehow witness the endings we’ve met along the way. We must appreciate what has closed before we can appreciate what is still open and possible.

If you’d like to give this perspective a try, here are a few questions to consider.

• What have been the most meaningful lasts in my life so far?
• Is there a meaningful last I missed? Or a meaningful last waiting to be acknowledged?
• Is there a last that might be past due?
• Are there any particular future lasts I’ll want to pay attention to?
• What do the lasts I’m reflecting on tell me about myself and what matters to me?

P.S. By complete coincidence, my ten-year-old son, who now stands just taller than my shoulders, jokingly challenged me to carry him “up up” last night after dinner. I engaged my core, bent my knees, and heaved him up. We stumbled around the living room together for a few seconds as he laughed hysterically, his big feet flapping around the backs of my knees, before he fell off. And I gave the universe a silent thank you for the gift of one more precious “last.”

P.P.S. For the record, it was never clear to me what my children’s official first words were.