There can be something cruel about “normal.” One of the hardest parts of losing someone isn’t what was said – it’s what wasn’t. We never know which conversation will be the last one with someone we care about, and it’s hard to deal with the thoughts, feelings, and words that were left unexpressed.
The fact is that most last conversations aren’t dramatic. They’re ordinary, casual, even mundane. And that’s what makes them so unbearable.
In Into the Night and Gone, Jackson confesses to his friends that he keeps replaying his last conversation with his father. He laments that it wasn’t profound, and it wasn’t emotional. It was just … normal.
Jackson learns that grief isn’t just loss – it’s replaying the past over and over again hoping that somehow, if we can only manage to figure out, and “get it right”, we can fix something.
Something I’ve learned over time is that, although our last words are often very normal – the words up till then don’t have to be. In the book, Jackson’s father died knowing that he was loved. He knew because of the eighteen years that they’d shared up to that point.
How many hours had they spent through the years rough housing, playing games, working on the car, clearing out the garage, or listening to music? Life is lived, and love professed, more often in those moments, much more than in an arbitrary last conversation.
So make those moments count.