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All those end of the decade lists cataloguing everything from the greatest political whoppers to the biggest news stories spur memory – when exactly did Enron happen? – not to mention lively debate.

Yet it's our personal milestones – a birth or death, a relationship or marriage beginning, ending or holding steady, our health challenges, a new job – that have more resonance at the close of the decade than everything but a handful of major news events. (I would put only the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the election of Barack Obama in 2008 in the “where were you when” category.)

So let the cultural hubbub subside for a moment and consider this: Ten years is a long time in a parent's life. In 2000 my daughter was 13 and poised on the brink of adolescence, still arranging the stuffed animals on her bed but already, along with her gaggle of high-spirited girlfriends, imagining a larger life (although one with a curfew).

Flash forward to this winter, where she, a footloose history grad, is in Paris launching herself at French culture. Just last week we spoke of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and of how the morning after a lively night of socializing, she and two friends, slightly the worse for wear, trudged to the Louvre and stared at the Mona Lisa. She's meeting her older brother for the holidays and they plan to usher in the new decade in Barcelona.

This is astonishing to me. (And not just because they are financing their own dreams.) Realistically, every parent knows that, if they are lucky, their children will eventually grow up. But we can't possibly predict how amazing it feels when they do. We can't know what their interests will be, or even whether siblings will stay close. That's what a decade will do.

Anyone who has lost one or both parents this past decade – and most of my friends have – will remember forever how and when it happened, and how bereft they felt.

In early 2007, losing my mother, who was central to my existence as a friend, confidante and benevolent parent, tilted the last three years of my decade into meditations – not always melancholy – on loss and grief and how we carry on our relationships with loved ones after they die.

I also lost several friends, which got me thinking about not just seizing the day but squeezing all the joy possible out of it. Not to mention staying in touch. That goes on your emotional résumé, which is always more important than that other one that gets so much attention.

Please don't even talk to me about how the decade aged us. I have one close friend who is imploring a nephew about to enter medical school to become a plastic surgeon so he can, you know, take care of all of us. And the physical complaints! Toronto writer Barbara Nichol refers to the conversation the middle-aged have as “the organ recital.” My heart! My liver! My thyroid! I may be wrong but I think our parents started on this pitiful litany a little later in their lives. Aren't we jumping the shark here? A fast approaching new decade has convinced me to close the book on aging – or the incessant talk of it. So let's go clubbing! Or at least stay up past 11 and have a tiny glass of cognac.

A decade is also an eternity in work (several bad bosses can stretch it out even further) and yet somehow not time enough to scale the highest professional mountain. So oops, I “forgot” to start that book I vowed I would write this decade. Hey, I still have three more days. It's doable.

What's important is that I kept doing what I loved – newspapers seemed more exciting to me than magazines for the last half of the decade – which I fervently hope is not the media equivalent of buying an Edsel. I also learned that resisting change in our business is futile. But I'm sorry, Tweeting seems irrelevant to me. An online presence sure doesn't, however. Like my colleagues, I am ending the decade ruefully aware of how many online “hits” any column receives, which is how musicians must feel about songs inching (or not) their way up the charts. Humbling, but galvanizing as well.

So now I ask you: What's on your personal milestone list? What are your greatest emotional hits of the decade? What personal events made your headlines?

I'll close with one of my favourites: celebrating 25 years of being together with my husband and pondering as always the mysterious alchemy of marriage. Now that's worthy of a book. Or at least a shot of cognac.

Judith Timson's column will appear regularly on Fridays beginning Jan. 1.