AND

Everything heavy settles back into the ordinary.

A baby is born.

And life goes on.

First steps.

And life goes on.

School, friendship, heartbreak, graduation.

And life goes on.

A job, a panic attack, falling in love.

And life goes on.

A wedding, a child, a funeral.

And life goes on.

Gray hair, wrinkles, retirement, travel.

And life goes on.

A diagnosis.

And life goes on.

A final breath.

And somehow, life still goes on.

This realization can be unsettling at first.

As if we don’t matter.

As if the world simply shrugs.

As if the morning sparrow keeps singing because our lives meant nothing.

The news won’t mention us.

Most of the world will never know our name.

But that was never the measure of meaning.

Life continues.

Not because we’re insignificant.

Because life is larger than any single moment.

Someone misses us.

We mattered.

Someone laughs at a story about us years later.

We are still living in the lives we touched.

Someone reaches for the phone to tell us something before remembering we’re gone.

Our lives never stopped the world.

They shaped it.

How could death erase

the kindness that became someone else’s kindness,

the healing that became someone else’s healing,

or the love that continued long after we were gone?

It can’t.

The world is different because we were here.

We are not standing outside of life, trying to understand it.

We are the very life we’re trying to understand.

Life isn’t happening somewhere else.

The people who love us go home.

They change clothes.

They feed the cat.

They take the trash to the curb.

They stop at the grocery store and wonder what kind of bread to buy.

Grief settles back into the ordinary.

Someone makes coffee.

Someone watches a baseball game.

Someone laughs so hard they forget, if only for a moment,

that yesterday they were crying.

The world keeps turning.

Not because joy is unimportant.

Not because grief is insignificant.

But because life has never belonged to a single moment.

And perhaps this is the magic of life.

Not found somewhere beyond the ordinary.

But hidden quietly within it.

Peace disguised as an ordinary morning.

Love disguised as calling someone just to say hello.

Grace disguised as someone saying,

“I’ve been thinking about you.

Can I do anything for you?”

Healing disguised as buying bread

and making a favorite sandwich.

One simple moment after another.

Never asking us to be extraordinary.

Only asking us to be here.

And that has always been enough.

We are enough.