What’s an Extraordinary Life, Anyway?

Live for the moments you can’t put into words.

— UNKNOWN

There are some people, it is written, who live extraordinary lives.

Their stories are put to print and adorn bookstore window displays; their lives elevated on platforms behind glass like crown jewels.

Their lives are worthy and interesting and often amazing. As extraordinary should be.

But if theirs are extraordinary, are ours ordinary? Plain?

My life doesn’t feel plain.

What defines an extraordinary life?

There are moments in my life that cement it so by any definition; sublime moments that sear into my brain and heart, superseding all other moments to remain remembered enough, powerful enough, that decades later they can halt my breathing, make me cry with joy or sadness, or bruise my heart.

Surely that’s extraordinary.

Like the time in high school when I met my husband Ron for the first time in Mr. Harper’s English class. He opened the door for me, leaning past me so close our thermal auras equalized—his green eyes staring me down, his gaze so penetrating it hijacked my primal rhythms and transformed my naive girl molecules into want ones.

Or the time I learned I was pregnant for the first time after months of wondering if I could get pregnant. My world screeched to a stop and nothing else mattered. I carried the light of the universe inside me.

Or on the first night in Italy when Ron and I slept in Venice on the top floor of an ancient hotel, the one with the zillion stairs no one liked to climb, but also the one with the huge skylight above and nearly as big as the bed. I lay there staring at the stars, more brilliant from the foreign view but mostly because Ron was sleeping by my side and we were living a dream. Tears of pure gratefulness soaked me asleep.

Or when I watched my son with his newborn son for the first time.

And then there’s the time I buried my mother seven weeks after burying my father.

I stood in the tree-lined cemetery in my little black suit with my pointed heels aerating the parched grass when the hearse, having been driven 325 miles north of home, arrived. The driver transferred the coffin to the dirt path only a few yards from the hole in the ground and it was then that I realized my beautiful mother was dead. And through my own doing, I was about to bury her deep—in the dirt—where neither light nor air could reach. The May-4th air crisped from the snowy mountain ridge and my heart jolted…

Socks! I didn’t dress her in socks! She’ll be so cold—forever.

There are more significant, rare moments in my life. Rare to me, but not to the world.

People are born. People fall in love. People die.

But, extraordinary is extraordinary as defined by its interpreter.

Surely we all live extraordinary lives?

I, for one, know no other.

 

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