The Ordinary

The things I miss most about Brady are not the big, dramatic moments. They are the ordinary ones.

The thousands of small, forgettable things that didn’t feel important in the moment because they were happening all the time. The moments you don’t photograph. The ones you assume will always be there.

When my children were babies, I was so aware of everything. Tiny fingers. Tiny toes. Button noses and bald baby heads. I loved rocking them in my yellow rocking chair. I loved wearing them in baby carriers and pushing them in strollers. I just loved all of it. I knew infancy was fleeting, even then.

Toddlerhood felt magical. Not because it was easy; it was exhausting in every way. But because it was so alive. Their words. Their big emotions. Their relentless energy. Their utter joy over things adults barely notice. Leaning into toddlerhood gives you a second chance at joy; the gift of seeing the world in a new way through your children’s eyes.

Once, Brady and I stumbled upon a huge soccer field that had been marked the day before with rows and rows of garbage cans. To him, it was astonishing. A field of garbage cans. An entire field!

We had been headed to a splash pad, but got there an hour early and had to wait. So instead we wandered through those rows of garbage cans together, marveling like we had discovered something extraordinary. We didn’t spend much time at the splash pad that day, but when I got them home and napping, I remember feeling deeply grateful that I hadn’t rushed past a moment that mattered. He talked about the field of garbage cans for a full week.

I can’t believe I found this photo, but I did. This was the magical field of garbage cans.

We had a favorite apple orchard. It was always empty. Brady and Sloane climbed trees. Eden would contentedly munch on apples. A five-dollar stuffed dog from the orchard gift shop somehow became one of Sloane’s most treasured possessions. Apple Puppy. Ordinary. Unplanned. Entirely unremarkable.

Royal Oak Farm Orchard in Illinois. The birthplace of Sloane’s Apple Puppy. One of my favorite places when my peanuts were little. This wasn’t staged. They just walked like this, which is maybe why my memories here are so happy.

Our ordinary before, before health issues, before movement issues, before swallowing issues, was so utterly beautiful and filled with joy.

Grief has taught me that it isn’t the big events that leave the deepest ache when they disappear. It’s the rhythm. The repetition. The daily texture of a life lived together.

Our ordinary after, after Brady lost his movement, after Brady lost his speech, after Brady could no longer swallow, was different. But it was still joyful. It looked like watching Lord of the Rings together for the thousandth time, with his sisters begging him to choose something else. It looked like renting the same pontoon boat summer after summer, tooling slowly down the same muddy river with the same friends on a sunny afternoon. Predictable. Perfect.

It looked like roller skating while I pushed him around the rink, Holding Out for a Hero blaring, his sisters whizzing past, sometimes stealing Brady while I tried to catch up.

Ordinary was the girls and me singing Taylor Swift’s Our Song at the top of our lungs in the car just to make Brady laugh as we acted it out 1,000 times this past summer.

It was driving to the barn as the sun went down and letting the horses come right up to the car window to say hello. Sitting in the backyard with the dogs, listening to chickadees. Trying again and again to find new ways for him to enjoy his swingset.

Brady loved kitchen gadgets. Waffle makers especially. He loved air fryers. He had a brand-new one still in its box, waiting in the basement. He’d gotten it for Christmas years ago and set it aside for the day we would enjoy crispy potato cakes, chicken, burgers, French fries, and meatballs together.

One Christmas, he picked out a turquoise kitchen mixer for me. That one was for baking together. Waffles. Muffins. All the things.

We saved them. For later! We were always saving things for when his body would cooperate again. And now later has arrived in a way none of us expected.

I finally took them out. A waffle maker. The mixer. The air fryer. We’ve used them. Cookies have been made. Meals cooked. They sit on my counter now, painfully ordinary and painfully special, exactly where they always should have been. They hurt to look at. But they also feel like a thread to my past.

Brady’s love lived in ordinary places. In kitchen tools and apple orchards. In garbage cans on soccer fields. In songs sung off-key in the car and slow afternoons that didn’t need to be anything more than what they were. Add this to the growing list of lessons I’m still learning, I guess. Ordinary days are not filler. They are not the space between meaningful moments. They are the meaning.

Yesterday, I ran Art to Sam’s Club to pick up some of his prescriptions. He wanted a hot dog. As we sat down, an older woman nearby began talking. And talking. And talking. I listened politely but felt pressed for time, quietly irritated that she was consuming what little margin I had that morning with him.

As we left, I apologized for our chatty new friend.

“It’s okay,” he said. “When people do that, it’s because they’re lonely. She needed someone to listen. She needed that.”

I had completely missed the moment. Will I ever learn?

We don’t lose people all at once. We lose them in a thousand small ways, in meals not shared, routines interrupted, moments that never announced themselves as so precious until they were gone.

I, a chronic rusher, a chronic worrier, a chronic one day connoisseur, am trying to learn to live awake to the ordinary. To notice. To stay present. To resist the urge to rush through the now while waiting for some fake, imagined later.

The miracle I spent a decade waiting for was never coming.

It was already here.