For the Days We Get

A reflection for the day after Memorial Day

There are people who never got to see what happened next.

They did not get the extra decades.

They did not get to grow older in ways they could not yet imagine. They did not get the second careers, the gray hair, the reading glasses, the creaky knees.

They did not get to watch their children become adults.

They did not get to meet the grandchildren whose faces they would have searched for traces of themselves in.

They did not get to discover that many of the things that once seemed urgent would, with time, reveal themselves to be less important than they appeared.

Their lives ended while the rest of their lives still lay ahead of them.

Memorial Day asks us to remember this.

Not as an abstraction.

Not as a flag waving in the distance.

Not as a long weekend and the unofficial start of summer.

But as individual lives, each as specific and textured as our own.

A favorite song.

A particular laugh.

Plans for next year.

An unfinished conversation.

A future that never arrived.

We speak of sacrifice, which is true as far as it goes. But what was given up was not only life itself. It was everything that life might have contained.

Ordinary mornings.

Arguments and reconciliations.

Summer evenings.

Inside jokes.

Birthdays.

Boring Tuesdays.

All the small moments that rarely seem remarkable while we are living them.

And perhaps that is part of what this day asks of us.

To remember that what we call ordinary is, in fact, extraordinary.

To recognize that the life in front of us, with all its frustrations and responsibilities and unfinished tasks, is also a gift.

The coffee growing cold beside you.

The conversation waiting to be had.

The sound of people you love moving through the house.

The simple fact that there is still a next chapter.

There is no way to repay people who gave up all of their tomorrows.

But perhaps we can honor them by showing up for the day we have been given.

By inhabiting it a little more fully.

By complaining a little less.

By paying attention.

By recognizing that this unremarkable moment, like all moments, is fleeting.

And by remembering that for many others, moments like this never came.

Between the cookouts and ceremonies, the flags and familiar songs, it may be worth pausing for a moment.

To remember those who did not get more time.

And to feel, quietly and without fanfare, the privilege of still being here.

-Scott