Bay Area authors thankful after overcoming challenges

In 2020, Audrey Ferber made no Thanksgiving plans. “With our friends and families locked down against COVID, and dementia muting my 88-year-old husband’s personality, it seemed easier to go it alone. We’d lost the big house we’d lived in and memories of celebrations past — 26pound turkeys, my mother’s cranberry sauce recipe tripled — brined me in self-pity,” said Ferber, an essayist and fiction writer at work on a memoir about caretaking, marriage and monkeys.

At the last minute, two friends joined them after all, each bringing their dog. “Nothing fills a house like streaking animals, the laughter of friends, and the aroma of even a downsized roasting bird. The Labradoodle rested her head in my husband’s lap. ‘Puppy shnuppy,’ he said and grinned wide.”

“There’s sadness in leaving past holidays behind but also freedom,” she said.

I asked Bay Area authors to reflect upon this week’s holiday — a bittersweet reminder of what we’re thankful for and the loved ones we’ve lost.

In 1990, novelist Matthew Clark Davison hosted Thanksgiving for the first time. “We were queer, barely adult runaways who landed in San Francisco.”

His friend Chuck brought the centerpiece, “a Barbie he’d Sharpie’d-up with Alice Cooper makeup, then jammed into a pot of Gerber daises.” He was dying of AIDS. For Halloween, he’d dressed as a zombie. “Practice,” he’d said.

By November, though, Chuck’s “pain meds and AZT made things dicey, but we had faith we’d get through the meal,” said Davison, author of “Doubting Thomas.”

Chuck died the next May. This year, together with his husband, Davison will host his brother, sister-in-law and niece, who were coming to Oakland for the first time. “Teresa and Amara will, with any luck, teach me to cook Teresa’s mom’s pork green chile. If they do, I’ll add it to the long list of things for which I’m most grateful.”

Twenty-one years ago, novelist David Corbett’s wife, Terri, was dying of ovarian cancer. “Pain control was inadequate, sleep restless despite constant exhaustion. As the rain fell on Thanksgiving, the dogs next door, left outside, barked nonstop.” In her semi-delusional state, his wife thought they were “graveyard dogs,” said Corbett, the author, most recently, of “The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday.” In time, he happily remarried. Three years ago, his father-inlaw died from pulmonary fibrosis. His mother-in-law’s earlyonset dementia worsened rapidly, and due to the pandemic, his wife, Mette, hasn’t been able to visit her at the nursing home in Norway. And this past spring, their wheaten terrier succumbed to cancer. “So we’re grateful to be together this holiday,” Corbett said. “It could so easily not be the case.”

Heather Bourbeau was reuniting with friends she met in the late ’90s at Thanksgiving potlucks in Boston and Provincetown. The pandemic halted the decades-long tradition, but it resumes this year in a Berkeley park.

“We might not check in on Christmas, Hanukkah or New Year’s, but every Thanksgiving I hear from dear friends I met over (my friend) Laura’s delicious turkey, quince and cranberry sauce, and several competing East Coast-West Coast stuffings,” said Bourbeau, author of the forthcoming poetic memoir “Monarch.”

For poet Shikha Malaviya, a bountiful table is intrinsic to her culture. “The Sanskrit saying Atithi Devo Bhava, ‘the guest is God,’ is stamped in our hearts.”

This year, they were hosting 19 family members across three generations. “Though devastating, the pandemic has brought my immediate family together geographically, including siblings moving from Germany, and my mother and mother-in-law from India sheltering with us,” said the author of “Geography of Tongues.”

She counts her blessings: Her son mastered the art of pizzamaking; she completed a book she spent five years writing; her daughter graduated from college wearing a cap, gown and a mask; and the family got vaccinations, even though they had to drive to a mosque two hours away for their first dose. “We celebrate all of us living on the land of the Ohlone … and being able to honor those now gone.”

“There’s sadness in leaving past holidays behind but also freedom.” Audrey Ferber, essayist and fiction writer