On January 8, 2022, about to go onstage to perform stand-up, Bob Saget —legendary comedian, longtime host of America’s Funniest Home Videos, and Danny Tanner on Full House—got a text from his daughter. We don’t know what she said, but it wasn’t urgent.
He could have easily said to himself, I’ll respond later. I’ll call her in the morning. We’ve all done it. We’re running late. We’re processing emails when they call from the other room. We’re about to go into a meeting when they text us. We’re tired and we rush through our good-nights.
We tell ourselves that we’ll respond in a little bit. We tell ourselves that we’ll have another chance, that there will be other phone calls, other texts, more good-nights. But that’s not always true.
Saget took a second to send what neither of them could have known would be his last text. “Thank u,” he wrote. “Love u. Showtime!” Hours later, he’d be found dead, tragically, in his Orlando hotel room at age sixty-five.
No one knows what their last words will be. No one knows how much time they have. So let’s use the time we have, before we lose the time we’re never guaranteed. Let’s make sure we tell our kids how we feel about them while we can.