If only I’d realized, at the end of the visit, that I was sharing a final hug with my mother, I would’ve held on longer, come back sooner, stopped rehashing our family’s concerns about her marriage and Clyde’s insistence that they move halfway across the country to live in Manteo. If you could know—if you could always know—when the lasts in life are coming, you’d handle them differently. You’d savor. You’d stop. You’d let nothing else invade the moment.
