This Thanksgiving post is about gathering the emotional and mental fortitude to find gratitude, as that is what will be more trying this year. Of course there is always something, often many things, to which we should offer gratitude and appreciation, and I’ve always been relatively decent about expressing that. This year, however, things feel a little off, as it’s our first holiday season without Dad, and out of our old home, and all the change is proving difficult. The holidays have, up until now, provided the one moment we usually managed to come together.
And so, a different sort of gratitude – and mostly this Thanksgiving is about giving thanks to all the years our family had in more or less intact form. It doesn’t end, it only changes and evolves. When I think about the upcoming holiday season, I expect it to be different, and sadder, and maybe all the other changes will do us some good. In many ways, I didn’t anticipate being bothered or upset by the holidays, because in truth my Dad didn’t play a big role in the mayhem of this most wonderful time of the year. I think he was sometimes more comfortable going to work or OTB than being home without those outlets being open for a few hours. Not that he didn’t enjoy his family, he simply didn’t know what to do with himself other than watch television or peruse his racing forms. In the last four or five years, his health was such that he didn’t participate much at all, which was just an exacerbated extension of the slight disengagement we all knew and accepted, and which I understand more and more the older I get.
For me, Thanksgiving hasn’t been the same since 1990, which is when our family and the Ko family spent the last holiday season with all of us still alive; Suzie’s Dad died the following spring, shifting our lives irrevocably.
In 2001, Andy’s Mom died on this day, adding another layer of loss to the holiday, and changing our lives again. The holidays grew a little sadder, a little lonelier then, especially for Andy.
But on Thanksgiving, we’d still get together, and my Dad would still carve the turkey, and it was the one thing that seemed to stay the same until a couple of years ago.
I will miss that, I will miss his perfectly-carved turkey, and I will be thankful for all those years we had, while looking for the ways our family might move forward.
Here’s wishing a Happy Thanksgiving to you – embrace your loved ones who are here, and hold tight to the memories of those who are no longer with us.
