The Last Kiss

The last time I kissed my grandmother, she tasted faintly of peppermint and tea.

I didn’t know it was the last time.

If I had known, I would have stayed longer. I would have let my lips rest against her papery cheek and memorized the warmth of her skin. I would have breathed her in—the lavender lotion, the starch of freshly folded sheets, the sweet, dry scent of the biscuits she always kept in the tin shaped like a blue cottage. I would have pressed my face into the soft hollow between her shoulder and neck the way I did when I was small.

But that afternoon was ordinary.

And that is how the most important moments often disguise themselves—wearing the plain clothes of routine.

She had been shrinking for years. Not just in height, though she had lost an inch or two, folding inward like a closing book. She was shrinking in voice, in appetite, in the quickness of her laugh. Time was tucking her in.

Her house, however, felt unchanged. The clock in the hallway still ticked with patient authority. The carpet still carried the faint impression of where her armchair had rested for decades. The kitchen still smelled like sugar and butter, like memory and warmth.

I went to see her on a Sunday. I always visited on a Sunday, she loved eating her dinner while watching quiz shows and we'd both yell the answers as if the presenter could hear us both.

I remember how she insisted on standing to hug me, though I could feel the tremble in her arms.

“You’re getting taller every time I see you,” she said.

I wasn’t. I had stopped growing years before. But she liked to believe in growth.

We sat at the small kitchen table, knees touching. She asked about work, about friends, about whether I was eating properly. I gave the usual answers, edited for reassurance. I didn’t tell her about my doubts or the quiet fears that followed me like a second shadow. She had carried enough fear in her lifetime.

Instead, she told me stories.

She told me of her brothers and father all having a broken leg at the same time and sitting with their legs up whilst the women served them, both with food and an eyeroll. She told me of the books she loved to read, and loved to read to her mother. She told me of the times she went to the disco with her sister and how it was a shame that was no longer the fashion. How her father used to pick her up and spin her, or dance with her on standing on his toes- much like my father used to do with me.

She paused, eyes searching my face "I suppose you never know when it's the last time"

I smiled, but I didn't understand.

I remember as a child I used to sit on my fathers shoulders as we explored the theme park because my legs had grown tired and so had my patience, but my father always scooped me up like i was light as a feather. His mood never faltered, if he ever worried about anything- he never showed it to me or my sister. I didn't realise the last day it ever happened, when he could no longer pick me up because i'd grown too tall.

The last time I slept in my childhood bedroom was before i moved countries, i still had the winnie the pooh rug I had when I was a toddler. There were boxes stapled up with IMPORTANT written on them. I thought I would be back, and I was—holidays, visits, brief returns. But I never lived there again in the same way. I never belonged to those walls the way I had.

The house moved on without me. And so did I.

My grandmother’s baking were famous within our family. The recipes were simple—flour, butter, sugar—but she made them as though they were an offering. She would roll the dough with slow precision, cut perfect circles, press a fork into the tops to leave neat ridges. She even baked my parents wedding cake, which my father joked was the best part of the entire affair.

As children, we would hover at the oven door, fogging up the glass with our breath. She taught my cousin and my sister how to do it. By the time I was old enough, her hands would shake too much. She could no longer do it the way she always had. "Time punishes us all" she'd say, though I never understood what she meant.

The biscuit tin grew emptier over the years.

So did she.

When I stood to leave that Sunday, she walked me to the door.

“Take care of yourself,” she said.

“I will.”

“Love you, Nan,” I said.

“Love you more,” she replied, the way she always did.

Several weeks later, she was gone. She had fallen, quickly after dementia was diagnosed, and soon after that she was a ghost of herself.

It was peaceful, they said. In her sleep. As though sleep were a gentle border one could simply step across.

At the funeral, I kept replaying memories of her in my mind. Had she known? Did she realise she was forgetting? Did she remember me? Did she know how much I loved her? Did I tell her enough?

Grief is a strange archivist. It catalogues details you didn’t know you were collecting.

I remembered the crinkles in her skin when she smiled, the way her eyes always softened when she saw me. I remembered her cooking me soup everytime I was sick, and waving at me through the hole in the fence as I walked to the school bus. Little things, precious things, that I was too young and naive to appreciate.

I remembered the kiss.

I had given thousands of kisses in my life. Quick ones. Distracted ones. Obligatory ones. But that one now stood apart, glowing with a meaning it did not announce at the time.

It was the last.

Life is full of lasts, but they rarely introduce themselves.

The last time your mother braids your hair.

The last time your friend calls you just to talk about nothing.

The last time you run through the front door of your parents’ house without knocking.

The last time you hold someone’s hand and don’t yet know you will one day have to let it go.

We move through these endings blindly. Perhaps that is a mercy. If we knew, we might cling too tightly. We might never step forward.

And yet, knowing that there will be lasts—even if we cannot name them—changes something in me now.

I linger longer.

When I visit my parents, I let my father tell stories I’ve heard before. I watch the way my mother gestures with her hands when she laughs, and listen to the same jokes.

When a friend hugs me goodbye, I hug back fully.

We are, all of us, a series of moments strung together by breath.

We are the child on a father’s shoulders and the father with aching arms.

We are the granddaughter at the kitchen table and the grandmother stirring tea with trembling hands.

We are first steps and last dances. First homes and final farewells.

And in the end, we are stories.

My grandmother’s story does not end with the hospital bed or the quiet closing of her eyes. It lives in the way I make a cup of tea. In the way I say “Love you more.” In the way I now pause before leaving.

The last kiss was not dramatic. Life does not give us grand finales where we all get closure.

It gives us quiet afternoons, day trips out, concerts and school trips. Things that seem meaningless eventually grow to have meaning as you get older.

It gives us chances—again and again—to savour the firsts while we still can.

The first time you fall in love.

The first time you hold your nephew.

The first time you realize your parents are human.

The first time you understand that time is not endless.

I want them to say "she kissed them like it mattered". Because you know what? It did