This will be the first Thanksgving, the first Holidays, without my mother. Connie passed away at the age of 81 last August. It was a peaceful passing to join the love of her life, my father,who she felt had waited long enough.
Today, I read a poetic essay by James Carroll, a columnist for The Boston Globe. I thank him for reminding me to take the time to remember how wonderful the "Holidays" can be. I am giving myself just a little time off this week from thinking about all the turmoil and injustice in our world. Instead, I will feed my soul with the calm and the memories of the things I am thankful for.
Mr. Carroll's column is excerpted below. Please go read the whole thing.
This diary is for everyone of us who has an empty chair or two at the table this Thanksgiving.
THIS WEEK marks a shift in how you live. You enter a special province in time, leaving behind the mundane units of day, week, and month for the odd sensation of something called "the holidays."
For the past ten year's since my father's death, my sister, who was the main caretaker of my mother, has defined the Holidays by planning hers to always include my mother. The new freedom she has this year to go anywhere she wants, is of course, bittersweet. I recognize that she feels the loss of our mother more than me, because Mom was an everyday presence in her life. I could only make the trip from Cape Cod to Boston once a week at best, but usually not more than once a month. My mother was blessed, I was blessed, to have her always there for her. For the first time, my sister is coming here for Thanksgiving.
Rituals define you now. Travels to be with family and friends; the happy meal this Thursday; the mind turning then to pleasures and challenges of gift giving; the unbearable shortness of days; the pin-prick lights that transform bare trees into lacey white fingers; stores tricked out in the red-green of holly; seasonal music; open expressions of fellowship; raucous parties - all evoked by the word that once meant "holy day."
As I have gotten older and my two boys are now grown and gone, the Holidays have changed. The hustle and bustle of the years when our house was filled with the children's anxious anticipation have given way to a more melancholy and contemplative time. Hopefully, someday my sons will be bringing future grandchildren over the bridge and through the woods to this grandmother's house....and the anxious anticipation will be mine.
As these last pages of the calendar turn, present time becomes imbued with the past, because you have marked all of these milestones of age before.
The holidays take off from memory, so every experience comes accompanied with its twin from long ago - or last year. Therefore, on Thursday, you won't set the table, placing the good silver fork beside the fine china plate, without thinking of other Thanksgiving tables. You will see yourself as you were across time, and you will think, perhaps, of those who are not here this year. How is it possible that grandmother's house is gone? Where did touch football games down by the river go? Much as you delight in who is coming for turkey, you can't help seeing the faces of those who will be absent. That twinge of sadness is how you keep your love for them alive.
After my father died,he was still a presence at our holiday table in my mother's face. She swore she had an unwritten plan to join him before two years passed. But, she spent nine more years at my sister's table, besting us all at our traditional after dinner Trivial Pursuit.
When you eat the traditional foods, part of what you will savor is the tradition itself. Repetition is how you learn acceptance. To come to the table this week is like reading journal entries aloud, so vividly recalling how you felt before that you feel it again.
That doubling of experience - the two dimensions of "then" and "now," but held as one dimension - swings a door open to a larger realm of existence, which is why, even knowing it will exhaust you, you love this time of year.
The holidays offer a reprieve from episodic time, in favor of what philosophers might call narrative time. Stories abound, and at every table you will tell them
So, instead of mourning another loss, this year we will celebrate our family. My sister will bring the sweet gherkins in Mom's pickle tray. I will bake Mom's lemon meringue pie and we will play Trivial Pursuit, the original one of course, and we will remember that Mom would know the answers to all those questions that are on the tips of our tongues but lost to another generation.
All of this could revolve around less fraught themes than light and dark, beginning and end, the crack in the stone of time. But your kind discovered long ago that the way for one generation to hand itself off to the next is the way each year does it - starting with the word thanksgiving.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
So, maybe for a few days, I will be focused on my family and my own little corner of the world. But, I know as I see the empty chairs of my mother and my youngest son....one now happily with my father and the other happily living in Denver with his girlfriend....I will take a moment to remember too many empty chairs of the loved ones lost to the unspeakable violence in Iraq. Peace be with you.
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