Bonus Day

What did you do with your extra day yesterday?

“Happy 16^th Birthday” a friend wrote to her husband yesterday.  He was a high school friend of mine, so I wondered if she had a typo in the note, until I remembered the uniqueness of his birthday on February 29.

All day yesterday felt like a bonus day.  I had dinner with people I enjoy, learning things I didn’t know.  The pedicurist painted my toes bright pink.  Even when I had to put my boots back on, I knew that dose of spring was still there.  Bonus. 

But then, isn’t every day a bonus day? 

When I was a baby chaplain, I spent days in hospital waiting rooms with people whose grief overwhelmed my meager skills.  Their faces have blurred with time, and still their stories remain.  Car accident on a rainy road.  A truck that crossed the center line.  Lightning on a golf course.  Stupid teenage drivers going too fast in a tin can of a car.  Gunshot in a forest.  All those accidents and suicides taught one lesson.  Life changes fast.  No day is certain. 

So, then, isn’t today a bonus day?

Since the day I sat in the funeral home parlor, making arrangements for my brother’s cremation, every day feels like a mystery gift.  Even then, in the first wail of grief, we knew we had a choice.  Would we remember him with guilt and recrimination?  Or, in our tears, find a way to add his lost happiness to our own?  My brother’s legacy of kindness and goofiness is a good example of making every day extra.  Deeper joy is the twin of grief, eventually.    

I was raised to be dutiful and nervous.  “The purpose of life is not to be happy,” I heard often. Now I answer back in my head — “why not?” Still, I never expected to have a life this happy.  (Thank you, therapy.)  Every day is “extra,” as people say.  Bonus. 

There’s another bonus day today, and tomorrow, and the day after. 

Image via Pexels.