Susan Kiernan O'Horo, MD

The Last Snowman I’m at that stage of life where I’m starting to realize that some moments might be happening for the last time. Yesterday, my middle son and I built a snowman :-). Yes, this 60-year-old doc's child comes out every now and then. Fresh snow, quiet air, the kind of morning that feels suspended outside of time. He’s graduated from college. His life is already pulling him west…toward love, toward opportunity, toward whatever comes next. And as we packed snow between our hands, shaping it into something temporary and imperfect, I realized this might be the last time we do this together. Not the last time we’ll talk. Not the last time we’ll laugh. Not the last time we’ll see each other. But the last time we’ll build a snowman. No one tells you how parenting changes. At first, it’s all beginnings. First steps. First words. First days of school. You’re trained to look forward, always forward. And then, without warning, life quietly starts handing you endings instead. Not loud ones. Soft ones, often unannounced. You don’t get a notification that it’s the last time they’ll fall asleep on your shoulder. Or the last time you’ll hold their hand crossing a street. Or the last time you’ll all be living under the same roof. You just live through them. And only later do you realize what they were. I want my kids to move on. I want them to chase what calls them. I want them to build lives that are expansive, brave, and unmistakably theirs. I’m proud of their independence. Proud of their curiosity. Proud of who they’re becoming. But pride doesn’t erase grief. It just lives beside it. I’m climbing what’s been referred to as my Second Mountain now. The first was about building, proving, and accumulating. This one feels different, quieter, and far more deliberate. It’s less about adding, more about distilling. Less about what I achieve per se, and more about what and who I carry forward. And with that shift comes questions that don’t always have clean answers. Was I present enough? Did I listen well? Did I prepare them for what I couldn’t protect them from? What did I miss while I was busy building everything else? I don’t know. Maybe no one ever really does. Yesterday, we built a snowman. But, for me,  it wasn’t really about the snowman. Well… maybe a little about the snowman. But… It was about time. About becoming…. and about letting go without letting love leave. About standing in that strange, tender overlap where past, present, and future all exist at once. If that really was our last snowman, I’m grateful I was there for it.