2. eulogy of the ordinary

the stuff that matters

I remember my therapist once telling me about the heartbreak of parenting and the continual and eventual letting go that you never feel quite prepared for. He quietly smiled telling me about how much he missed spending time in the car with his daughter. How it seemed that years of his life were spent in the car with her taking her to and from her various activities and listening to her actively not listening to him (this made him laugh). He said, “God, I’d love to get back into that car.” 

I cried. It was the first time I cried in his office, actually. We were in the early days of discussing my father’s prognosis and through muffled sobs and the sleeves of my sweater I offered, “me too.”

Losing my father made me fall in love with the ordinary. The irony here is that his life was filled with tall-tale-esque adventures and travel that led a friend of his to affectionately refer to him as Forrest Gump (“of course Robert has been there or seen that or was there when that happened or has a story about that”). He was not ordinary. His life was not ordinary. But the ordinary that has been stripped from me, from us, is what I miss so desperately and what fills me with grief. 

There is nothing extravagant about him packing my morning bagel for four years of high school or the daily drive to drop me off and his commentary on my musical choices. These are the mundane and likely monotonous bits of parenting. The deeply accurate “if you know you know” element to the grief club is mostly an intimate understanding of how shockingly painful remembering the commonplace can be, and therefore, how holy it is. I now find myself reverent to the smallest of moments throughout my day knowing how quickly it could all disappear. It’s a superpower I think- this authentic noticing of the present. Of what matters in the present. 

Jack Gilbert writes of this in one of my favorite poems of his “Highlights and Interstices.” He asserts that “our lives happen between the memorable,” and laments the loss of his late wife and their habitual breakfasts together. He even notes that the commonplace he didn’t notice when she was alive, those holy moments that weren’t committed to memory- he even misses those. 

Why, then, is the official writing to commemorate the dead focused on the opposite– the titles, the accomplishments, the uncommon parts of life? Isn’t it more honest to write of the average and the routine? 

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RNSP 1944-2022

I’ve asked you for oatmeal- it’s the new breakfast routine I’m in. I’m 22 and home for the summer. You deliver a bowl, steel cut and perfectly cooked with pristine bananas layered intentionally in a circle and blueberries a perfect pile at the center. 

The betrayal of my alarm clock each day to wake me up with bedside tea. The sound of your knife spreading butter on toast.

My favorite band’s concert and a friend who canceled. It was your idea to go in her place and it was you who made me laugh at how you weren’t the oldest person there. 

Your phone call to see if I’ve checked the oil in my car when I know mom told you he broke up with me. You called every day for weeks with questions “about the car.”

Jamie Oliver’s chicken roasting when I arrive home from the airport–its crispy basil, runny tomatoes, and your daily demand that we “break the chill on the plates.”

An audible grin as you listen to my short lived desire to minor in “Argumentation” during a phone call on my way to class. Your response, “how American, Krisp.”

— my preferred nickname, your invention. The animated recitation when asked of its origin: “We few, we happy few…” as if everyone knew Shakespeare’s Henry V by heart.

A card on my 23rd birthday- a black and white cartoon of a woman shopping. The caption (her dialogue) “It’s for the economy.” Your note- “Well done. -Dad.” 

A nod to the notion that simply making it through is sometimes enough.

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***Make the chicken for someone you love on an ordinary day. Tell me about it?