Sacred Ordinary Mornings

Photo by Luke van Zyl on Unsplash

I have no memory of that Tuesday morning. I was two years old, maybe three weeks past my birthday, when my father kissed my mother goodbye and walked out our front door for the last time. I can't tell you what he smelled like, or the sound of his voice calling my name, or how his hands felt when he picked me up. Those sensory memories that shape most people's earliest recollections of their fathers simply don't exist for me.

But I do remember my mother's cries. And I remember my brother's terror.

My earliest memory isn't of my father at all—it's of what happened after.

We were in our big station wagon with a brown stripe, one of those old ones with the fold-down seats in the very back that faced each other when you put them up. Mom was trying to drop Richie off at school, but he wouldn't go. He was too scared. Too broken. When Mom got out to get the principal's help, Richie bolted to the back of the station wagon and crawled underneath the fold-up seats.

"Hide me," he pleaded with a look only a scared, persuasive brother could give.

I was just a toddler, but somehow I understood the game. When he disappeared under there, I folded the seats back up and sat down on top of them. The mat that went over the seat was heavy, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get it to lie flat. I sat over the rippled part, hoping Mom wouldn't notice.

"Where is Richard?" Mom asked when she came back with the principal. "Richie went to school," I announced with the confidence only a two-year-old can muster.

Mom knew better. She pulled up those seats, and there he was—my big brother, curled up underneath, trying to disappear. When the principal said it was time to go, Richie pulled out a pocketknife and said no. A little boy so terrified of leaving his mother that he'd threaten an adult rather than walk into that school.

We'd driven past the accident on his way to school that day, and everything changed. Dad's little Dodge Colt was crumpled into twisted metal and broken glass on the side of a motor home. A monument of how quickly everything can change. There were ambulances and police cars. Richie must have seen it, though we've never talked about that. Mom saw it for sure. She went to the school, dropped him off, and then went back to the scene to find that the love of her life had gone.

The official story goes like this: Dad got to the four-way stop, and when it was his turn to go, another driver who didn't see the stop sign broadsided him. The force was so hard that he flew a couple of hundred feet through a plastered fence, then into a mobile home. He died on impact, they said, though the paramedics tried CPR, anyway. His ribs had punctured his aorta. Forty-six years old. No warning. No goodbye.

I don't remember him the way you might remember someone who shaped your childhood. Instead, I live inside the memories others have shared with me: Mom's stories before cancer took her too, the ones she would share when my stepfather wasn't in earshot, my brother's recollections, and the mythical father my young mind constructed to fill the gaps.

What I know for sure: that Friday morning, Dad had plans. He was going to finish projects, keep promises, live his life. Neither he nor Mom expected the plan to end at a random four-way stop on what seemed like just another ordinary day.

Sometimes I catch myself living in the "someday" attic—that mental space where everything important gets stored for later.

I'll call them tomorrow. I'll start that project next month. I'll say I'm sorry when the time is right.

It's like I believe that time is a renewable resource that we can regenerate. Like all of my careful planning could somehow negotiate with the universe and guarantee me another day.

What if worrying about what might become is just your sophisticated way of avoiding what is? What if the thing you want to manifest is actually the very thing you're most afraid to face? Or perhaps you have tried for years to get clarity on your dream, your purpose, but you are already living it, but you're too afraid to see that?

I think about Dad in that Dodge Colt, probably humming along to the radio, maybe running through his mental to-do list. I have already lived my life longer than he had a chance to. That feels both surreal and frightening. He didn't know he had minutes left. But even if he had known, would he have spent those minutes differently? Probably. Would it have mattered, or would it have been too late?

Maybe the point isn't to live every day like it's your last. Maybe the point is to live every day like it's the only chance you get to be you.

Maybe it's the only chance you get to be you....

Because guess what? It might be. My brother learned this lesson at eight years old, huddled under those station wagon seats with a pocket knife, too terrified to let our mother out of his sight. He understood something I wouldn't until mom died years later: when everything you thought was permanent can disappear quickly…sometimes instantly, holding on becomes an act of survival.

Even at two years old, sitting on top of those seats, I was somehow part of the story. I was there. I was present. I was helping my brother hide, being his accomplice in the only way a toddler could. Maybe that's what we're all doing—helping each other hide when we need to be helping each other emerge when we're ready.

Dad never got to see me grow up. But he made a lasting impression: the knowledge that every ordinary morning might be the last one, and that makes every ordinary morning sacred.

What would you do differently if you knew today was your only day to be you? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.