Today, I met a friend for lunch at Sweet Green. She’s here on a short trip from Seattle, where she and her boyfriend are currently living. Since she left New York in 2012, I see her only about once a year when she is back in the city to visit family and friends, and her schedule is always so tight. I rarely have more than an hour or so with her because there are too many people to see in too short of a time.

It made me think about how as we get older, it’s almost like we feel we have less and less time. Some things are more real, like a woman’s actual internal clock for having a baby, but other things are more around social things, like how much time do we have to spend with friends and family, especially those who don’t live near us when we are all together? We always think about maximizing time with people we love because without love and friendship and relationships in general, we have nothing. But it gets harder and harder when there are people you have to split time up for, and what if you say you will meet ‘next time,’ but next time never comes?

It’s like that time in September 2013 when I came home shortly after Ed passed away, and I was insistent that my parents and I eat dinner with my dad’s good friend Bob. They were arguing over who was going to pay the bill — in other words, over stupid, petty things, and I said to both sides, what if we never have the chance to do this ever again? My parents didn’t care. Typical them. They said, forget it. Bob caved in and said, okay, I thought about what you said. I’ll come and your parents can pay. Well, we never had the opportunity to have a meal together again after that one meal in September because that following November, Bob died suddenly. It was all over. And now, we have that last meal as our last memory all together.