For Father’s Day, reminders about ordinary lives

Father’s Day can be complicated.

For some people, it is a day of gratitude. For others, it brings grief, absence, anger, longing. And often it can be a mix of all of that.

Some fathers are easy to celebrate. Some are hard to understand. Some are gone. Some were never fully present.

So this week, as part of our occasional “Mortal Matters Picks” roundup, I’m offering three pieces that are not really about Father’s Day in the usual greeting-card sense.

They are about ordinary lives. The kind that may look small from a distance but hold entire worlds for the people inside them.

1. A quiet life

Let’s start with this beautiful Bitter Southerner essay by Jeremy B. Jones: “Obituary for a Quiet Life”.

Jones writes about his grandfather, Ray Harrell, who died in the mountains of North Carolina after a life that did not lend itself to the usual obituary form.

There were facts to list, of course. Birth. Marriage. Work. Military service. Survivors.

But what mattered was harder to capture: the porch, the daily chores, the long marriage, the small piece of land, the work done for no applause, the contentment that can look, from the outside, like a lack of ambition.

The line that stayed with me was this:

“On paper, this small life above Clear Creek should have left a long list of regrets, of what-ifs. But this life was the life, the very thing he and my grandmother Grace set out to make when they married in the little church up the road in 1954.”

That feels like a Father’s Day thought worth celebrating. Not every life needs to be large to be complete, and not every person wants a stage.

Some lives are built on everyday steadiness. On bills paid, month after month. Dishes washed, day after day. Showing up, again and again for the people and places that make up your life.

That kind of life is easy to take for granted until it is gone.

2. The ordinary miracle of being here at all

The second piece is Alan Lightman’s essay in The Atlantic: “The Ordinary Miracle of Existing”.

Lightman starts from science: the vastness of the universe, the depth of time, the wild improbability of any one of us being alive at all.

That could make a person feel tiny.

But Lightman turns the thought in a different direction. If each life is so brief and so unlikely, then the ordinary is not ordinary at all. Coffee. Breakfast. Work. Children. Errands. Gratitude. These are part of the miracle of living.

Seen that way, a quiet life is never a lesser life.

The fact that any life exists at all is astonishing, whether the world is impressed or not.

3. Shoulders

Finally, this is a good moment to read and listen to Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, “Shoulders.”

She shows us a man carefully carrying his sleeping son across a rainy street. That is all, and it is everything.

To care for another person is to be aware of danger and to move more carefully. To understand that someone else is depending on your steadiness.

That work does not belong only to fathers, of course.

Mothers, grandparents, and friends do it. So do nurses, neighbors, partners, siblings, teachers, and strangers.

We carry one another through rain, through traffic, through illness, through grief, through ordinary Fridays.

But on Father’s Day, this poem feels especially right, because the best forms of fathering often look like this: a sleeping child, a wet street, a person trying not to let the world come too close.

Maybe that’s what we most need for Father’s Day: a little more attention to the ordinary lives that made ours possible…

And to the people still carrying what they can, day by day.