My Ordinary “This is Us”

“Joy comes to us in ordinary moments. We risk missing out when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary.”

Brene Brown

I know I’m a bit behind, but it’s still hard for me to accept that the show, This is Us wrapped its final season. For six years, beginning in 2016, I followed members of the Pearson Family (namely twins, Kate and Kevin, adopted son Randall, along with mom, Rebecca, and dad, Jack) along circuitous life journeys that played into every possible emotion and scenario a young family could experience.

What makes this show especially unique is that it slips back and forth in time, showing the characters at different ages and in different years within each episode. Over the six seasons, you get to know the characters in real time as they age and grow, experience major set backs, and then get back up on their feet and plow forward. Creator, Dan Fogelman, along with his brilliant writers and producers, weave together stories that pull on every heart string you’ve got while telling powerful truths.

I guess I have a thing for family dramas, particularly ones that highlight imperfect characters, in whom I can see myself and those who so honestly reflect the world we are living in. NPR’s Eric Deggans sums it up perfectly, “In other words, the drama on This Is Us comes from small moments between characters living everyday lives.”

As a way of framing this post, I want to clarify that I’m not attempting to write a formal review or critique of the show. I’ll leave that to the experts! Instead, I want to share a few themes and narratives that were particularly resonant with me and my current roles as mom, wife, daughter, sister… trying to navigate life the best I can. I see this post as an homage really, to a show that has made such an imprint on my heart during a time when I needed its company.

The season finale, which aired on May 24, 2022 largely centered around an ordinary Saturday when the siblings are in their pre-teen years, living in the suburbs outside of Pittsburgh. When their plans are canceled at the last minute, they find themselves with an entire day with nothing scheduled. Mom and Dad are thrilled at the prospect of a quiet day and two of the three kids are bored out of their minds. Kevin and Randall sit on the couch checked out, making fun of their sister, Kate, who genuinely wants to spend time with her family. Kate has proposed a litany of family pastimes to keep them busy– puzzles, watching old videos, and playing an old pin the tail on the donkey game found on a bookshelf.

And what starts as an awkward “forced family fun” day turns out to serve as a microcosm for what the entire show is built on…appreciating the small moments, while they are happening. Little do the kids know, but just a few years later, their father (Jack) will suffer a fatal heart attack after a brutal house fire in the middle of the night. Jack will live on as a hero within them for decades to come and inform many of their life decisions but they will never have those small, fleeting moments back.

My wife and I recently decided to forego a 3 day exotic family camping trip we had planned months earlier and instead settled on a 3 day staycation. On a rainy summer Wednesday we trek up to Mystic, CT, to visit the aquarium. Our daughter revels at the Beluga whales and the proud penguins while her eyes loom large over whiskered sea lions and voluminous sea turtles. Before heading home we stop at a diner off the highway and order two salads and a grilled cheese. Our daughter is thrilled to hear that her lunch is accompanied by a complimentary ice cream scoop, which she mostly gobbles up and refuses to let us taste (we are still working on sharing).

It is such an ‘ordinary’ day, and, yet, as I write this post and think back to sitting at this nondescript diner I realize that, this is it…short, sweet, simple moments of connection.

Rebecca, the mother and matriarch on This is Us looms larger than life and serves as the anchor throughout the series. Like everyone else, she is imperfect, human and trying to figure things out along the way. She carries her family through endless trials including Jack’s death and raises three beautiful humans who go on to do the same for their families (the show seamlessly spans 4 generations). Rebecca and the entire family get thrown another curve ball mid-way through the series with her diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s. This curveball, although devastating, ultimately heightens the everyday themes of time, space and memories in beautiful and unexpected ways throughout the remaining seasons.

As Rebecca’s disease progresses ever so slowly at first and then more quickly towards the end of the series, I find myself floating back and forth in time in my life as well. While devouring the show each week, I can’t stop asking myself, what really matters? When my life and all the people in it are one day laid out before me as they are for Rebecca in a final metaphoric scene that takes place in an old-fashioned train car, how will I feel, what will I be thinking, what will I be regretting, what will I be most proud of?

Within this melancholy scene that parallels Rebecca’s final moments in life, I am smiling through my tears. I may have to flex a muscle, but in doing so I can see that it is within my power to stop grasping for things to be different. Like the Pearsons’, my life is messy and filled with ups and downs, regrets and yearnings. I may not have the next chapter (or two or three) figured out but neither did Randall, Kate, Kevin, Rebecca or Jack. Their lives are messy, filled with pain and loss, but they have one another. And that is more than enough.

As a closing thought, may we all lean into the ‘ordinary’ days and moments–and the people who fill them–and appreciate knowing that often, this is it.