Ferris Bueller Saved My Life Too

It’s a strange thing, to trace your existence back to a movie.

Not a war. Not a kiss. Not a near-death experience. A movie.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

I told my mom I was planning to see it at Hollywood Forever Cemetery — what felt like a fun, full-circle event, given how much the film has meant to me over the years. I expected her to nod politely. What I didn’t expect was for her to pause and say, un-ironically, “That movie saved my life.”

She told me that watching it made her not want to leave her husband and child. That child was my sister. I was born two years later.

I stared at her, stunned. My mom has an incredible memory. She remembers specific weather patterns, what day of the week we flew in on our trip back in 2001, what someone wore to a wedding in 1982. But when I asked her why she was so upset back then — why she had even wanted to leave — she couldn’t remember.

“Wow,” I said. “you can’t remember? That’s a first.”

She laughed. “I know, no kidding.”

And I said, “That means the movie did its job.”

Because Ferris didn’t ask you to fix anything. He asked you to notice. To smile. To get out of the system long enough to remember why you might want to stay in the world at all.

My mother stayed. My sister was raised. I was born.

So yes, Ferris Bueller saved her life.

But that means he saved mine too.

And now I’ll sit on the grass, at a cemetery, watching a story that rewrote the trajectory of my family — a story I memorized as a kid without knowing it was my origin myth. A story that reminds me: joy can be subversive, memory can be unreliable, and the smallest spark can shift everything.

Thank you, Ferris. For the fourth wall break. For the charm. For the day off that changed the script for all of us.

Life moves pretty fast. But sometimes, it moves just slow enough to save someone.

And if I may borrow from my favorite line:

“A: You can never go too far and B: If I’m gonna get busted, it is not gonna be by a guy like that.”