You just snap it, half annoyed, between other tasks, certain of a future thick with better chances, and then the future is taken away and that careless snapshot becomes the most important object you own.

I have thought about that a great deal.

We are not built to know which goodbye is the last one, and so we spend them all a little carelessly.

If I had known — if some mercy had warned me — I would have run after the truck.

I would have held each of them so long they’d have complained.

I would have memorized the exact weight of my youngest against my side.

But we are not given that warning, any of us, and perhaps it is a mercy that we are not, because a life lived bracing for the last goodbye is not a life.