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For the Last Time
Patrick Madden
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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents
Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other
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The secret horrour of the last is inseparable from a thinking being whose life is limited. . . . When we have done any thing for the last time, we involuntarily reflect that a part of the days allotted us is past, and that as more is past there is less remaining. —Samuel Johnson, “On Last Things”
A few weeks ago, before attending an academic conference in Norwich, England, I took a week to see the sights of London. A considerable portion of my time was spent visiting the haunts of Great Dead essayists, men such as Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt. Rarely were the homes and churches emplaqued or otherwise noted. Aside from Joseph Addison, who is buried in Westminster Abbey, their graves were unprotected from the elements and mendicants such as myself. I tried halfheartedly to keep my antennae open to possibilities for writing, but I also just wanted to live like a tourist for a while, hoping that this would calm my nerves a bit, keep my mind off the long list of things I ought to have finished already, hold at bay the entropy that rushes up to take hold of my consciousness and drag it downward. It worked on that score; but like all such diversions, it lasted only as long as the traipsing about, and when I returned to real life, I felt again the abrumant weight of my responsibilities and obligations.
So perhaps it’s no wonder that the story I grasped from my British wanderings is one of no consequence. What happened was I found my fly down after several hours of group tourism about the seaside at Southwold, the setting for parts of The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald. The realization came in the subfloor men’s bathroom of the Elizabeth Fry Building at the University of East Anglia, during a break in the aforementioned conference. Mentally retracing my morning, I deduced that I must have left my pants unzipped from the moment I put them on (one leg at a time). I chuckled contentedly, half-worried that I’d exposed my white underwear or caused a colleague some momentary displaced embarrassment but half-pleased that I’d done it again. Nobody had asked me if I was afraid of heights. And I could not recall any untoward attentions or, worse, evasions, but how would I know? I zipped up, washed my hands, and returned to my day.
I was left thinking, or am thinking now, about those events that punctuate the multivolume tome of our life, not with periods, not with question marks or exclamation points, but with commas, perhaps, or apostrophes, hyphens amid compound adjectives, colons before lists, the stuff that marks the way, making our reading make sense, workmanlike, by and large glossed over, unnoticed. How often are we stricken with hiccups? When will we need to clip our toenails again? When awaits us yet another crick in the neck? Or perhaps my mind is leaning toward the periods, the last times, farewells to small things, embarrassing things, things we should know better (or know better than to). When will we finally master our habits, overcome our shortcomings? Have we lost our keys for the last time? Can we be sure we won’t again leave our blinker on for miles and miles? Will we never again forget to take the garbage out to the curb? Have we seen the last of leaving our clothes in the washing machine until they mold or whatever it is that leaves us with stinkshirt, as my father calls it? What about the things we’ve very nearly mastered, like putting our shoes on the right feet or buttoning our shirt in proper correspondence? Can we ever be certain, even with advancing know-all technology to serve us, that we yet won’t leave our clocks unbacked or unforwarded? Or can we look forward to that amused discomfiture of showing up to church in the middle of the Mass before or after the one we’d intended to attend?
This is the case with leaving my barn door open. I’ve done it often enough in the past—I know I have. Likewise, I expect I shall do it again. This is not the sort of mistake one learns from, not a sin one repents and forsakes. By its very nature, zipper negligence is unintentional and absentminded. And while I certainly have cultivated the habit of zipping up whenever I get dressed or finish at the urinal, my mind often wanders, so I can be almost certain that I will find my brageta abierta in the future. I have tried to resist the thought that invades my mind trailing this harmless event: that all is vanity, or life is futile, that despite our best efforts, we can never escape the small embarrassments we bring on ourselves as we struggle to keep track of it all, as we innocently ignore our vulnerabilities. What’s more, the older we get, the more likely we are to lose our fine-minded refinements, so the probabilities of oversights increase. And for all of that, we can never be sure that we’ve seen the last of such peccadilloes. It would be nice, in a way, to know when we’ve made our last little blunders, though there’s a charm in not knowing, too, a blissful ignorance that hides from us the ticking of the clock or the tallying of days and moments.
Of course, at some point, known or unknown, each repeatable offense or harmless exercise must reach its final occurrence, such as what I’m quite sure was my father’s last backward bicycle ride. It happened at Notre Dame, on a sunny, carefree afternoon, after a pleasing swim in St. Mary’s Lake. Attendant characters, in addition to our protagonist, were my wife, Karina; my brother Dan (since I learned it, I have loved how my choice to include or omit commas indicates that I have only one wife and more than one brother); my four children—Pato, Adi, Sara, and Dani (who rode in a seat contraption on the back of her namesake uncle’s bike)—and I (riding tandem with Adi). We borrowed the bikes from the dormitory that operates as a hotel for alumni each summer. Dad and Dan (and Dani) were up ahead with Pato, impatient with Sara’s training-wheeled meandering. That left the rest of us back there in the shade, making slow progress amid the dirt and gravel, across small washouts and gullies, along the circular trail that rings the lake. As we crested the insubstantial hill into the vertical sunlight, I gathered in an almost-instantaneous scene: My brother paused and smiling at an island in the parking lot, holding the back-heavy bike holding Dani; my son lost somewhere among the scattered cars; my father sitting on his handlebars and facing his seat, feet on the pedals, neck craned, head turned toward me but eyes peripherating the path behind his back. He is headed toward a curb, moving too fast, turning not enough to avoid a collision. As the electric impulses zip from my eyes to my brain to my mouth to shout “Dad!” his front wheel jumps up and jerks right (his left) just onto the border grass and into the octagonal base of a light pole. Momentum is enemy; ballast is imbalance; a man set on his rump above the front wheel means only one thing: a glancing carom off the pole, the back wheel shooting up, my father twisting to brace his headlong tumble to the street below. But the bike is six inches above the asphalt, on the grass. His hands miss the soft turf by a horizontal six inches, so his head crashes helmetless to the street, crumpling under the accelerated weight of his body and the metallic contraption that traps his feet and legs.
In a second, Dan and I were at his side, helping him up, assessing his injuries. He got to his feet easily enough, if a bit groggily, blinkingly, behind his scratched glasses a slow trickle of blood, on his upper lip a raw exposed layer of skin. We left the bike where it lay and held his hands to show him to a nearby bench, to sit and think on the event. Already the children and Karina were with us, the former on the verge of tears, the latter on the verge of laughter. A red-haired woman who saw the whole thing asked, obligedly, “Are you okay?” My father mumbled an affirmative, and she continued past. I made the group’s first attempt at lightening the gravitas: “She’s thinking, ‘Are you okay, you idiot?’”
Dad perked up, “She said that?”
“No,” I said, immediately regretting my move but forced to follow through, “but she must be thinking it.” I thought to check his hearing when I got the chance.
Our own questions weren’t much more profound than the woman’s, but we were persistent, making sure he’d kept his bearings and didn’t feel too pained or otherwise untoward. He stood up well under our scrutiny, though Dan, gently removing Dad’s glasses, noticed a pulsing gash in the folds above his left eye.
Perhaps this was a moment to consider mortality, to imagine the world without my father, but our conversation was a mixture of immediate plans and gentle ribbing. Dad wanted to be sure the borrowed bike wasn’t noticeably damaged, so he announced his plans to ride it back to the dorm. Dan, keen to try out a role reversal, caught his words and remonished, “Ride it back, not backward.” He and Karina snickered, while I, ashamed of my prior failed attempt at humor, tried to remain stoic. Karina assuaged the children’s contagious crying with shushes and whispers that “Grandpa’s going to be fine.” They didn’t believe her.
But he was fine, all things considered, and so was the bike, so he did ride away, soon enough, with the rest of us alongside and behind, as he made it back to the dorm, then continued on to the hospital, where he omitted the “backward” detail in his explanation and found that he’d fractured his skull, an untreatable misfortune (stay out of the boxing ring is about all you can do for it), and then, in the coming days, traveled on to Milwaukee, his boyhood home, where a handful of cousins would relish his tale for its pure ridiculability.
For as long as I have known my father, he has talked about the summer projects that he and his friends would take on: juggling, walking on their hands, riding their bikes backward. I tried it all but mastered only a fraction of his feats and never quite got the balance and rhythm to ride my bike sitting on my handlebars. This was yet one more way in which I would never be my father’s equal. So it was a mix of sadness and pride that I felt, later, when reminiscing with my wife and brother, to have witnessed Dad’s last backward ride, the exclamation point ending that particular thread of his life.
I might have expected that I would twist out of my stories into braided meditations as soon as I set off to narrate, that I would, one might say, unzip from the constraints of chronicle into confabulation. It is a mode, I hope, not utterly unpleasant, as it gives both a recounting of events and an attempt at an ordering not only of chronologies but, as Lukacs says, of “souls and destinies.” God rest us both, my father and me, long into the hereafter, of course, but now, too, for brief snatches of peace amid all our self-created chaos, our ineluctable destinies of descent and decay.
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One of the fascinating things about last happenings is how seldom we recognize them or even remember them. With the now-middle-aged kids I grew up with, I often think nostalgically (on Facebook, mostly) about our idyllic childhood and how we never knew we were playing our last game of manhunt or building our last fort in the woods or jumping our bikes over each other for the last time. But all those things came to an end at some point, and we didn't think to lament their passing until much later. For this essay, the proximate occasion (noticing my zipper had been down all morning) gave rise to that line of thinking for insignificant things, which then brought me to what I was certain was the last time my father rode a bike backwards, which, because he was injured (not seriously) and some decades older than me, got me thinking about the inevitability of death and the irreversability of decay. Samuel Johnson showed up conveniently in my reading and provided an epigraph, and all that was left was some polishing and threading to make the essay seem whole.
Patrick Madden's newest essay collection is Recenses/Recencies (11/1/26), and he also wrote Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016) and Quotidiana (2010). He co-edited Fourth Genre: 25 Essays from Our First 25 Years (2025) and After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays (2015) and co-translated the Selected Poems of Eduardo Milán (2012). He is co-editor of the 21st Century Essays series at Ohio State University Press, co-editor of the literary journal Fourth Genre, and vice president of the NonfictioNOW Conference.
This essay originally appeared in Sublime Physick (2016).
