My daughter has a Toniebox. It’s a little music player for children: you put a figure on top, and it plays a story or a song. Four or five years ago, I recorded myself reading two stories for one of her figures: Where the Wild Things Are and Dogs Don’t Fly.
I heard her listening to the recording the other day and tried to remember the last time I’d read those books to her in person. I couldn’t. I realised I’d probably read them to her for the last time without knowing it. She’s nearly nine now and little picture books aren’t really her thing any more.
Then I wondered when I last read them to my son. They were books we loved when he was small, and then at some point he stopped wanting them. He turns fourteen next week.
I don’t think it’s just me. At the pace we live, with clubs to get to, work, friends to fit in and children to raise right, the tiny moments that make up the fabric of a life slip past unnoticed. I see cars with stickers that say, ‘One Life: Live It’, and as I speed past them, and they speed past me, I wonder whether their owners still notice them, or whether, like me most of the time, it’s become more of an aspiration than a way of living.
Even the less pleasant parts of parenting, getting them out of the house, trying to get them to do their homework, wiping a bottom, will each happen for the last time. One day you might even miss them.
There will always be a last time. There will be a last time you take a breath. There will be a last time someone you love takes a breath, and you may or may not be there to see it.
When my dad was dying, I knew, more or less, that the last time I saw him was approaching. What I could not have known was that, before his diagnosis, we had already had our last day together as a family without cancer casting its shadow over us. At the time, it was just an ordinary day. Nothing told us that the life we knew was about to change.
Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher, said that when you kiss your child you should silently remind yourself they may die tomorrow. I know that sounds horribly morbid. Looking at it through 2026’s eyes it is, but I think it’s the starkness of the thought that gives it its weight.
I look at my daughter now and realise there’s going to be a last time she wants me to hold her hand as a child. That doesn’t mean there won’t also be a first time she asks me to take her to a friend’s house, or to pick her up after a night out. Those are things I’m going to look forward to.
When I walked past her door and heard my voice on her Toniebox, I just went in and lay on her bed and listened with her.