San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Showlove and give thanks by social distancing
We’ll be staying home for Thanksgiving.
It’ll be the first time in nearly 20 years that I won’t spend Turkey Day with family in my hometown of Edinburg.
My wife, daughter and I are sad about it. But staying home feels like the right thing to do.
The saddest aspect of it is that we won’t get to see my motherin-law, an amazing person who has been a source of endless kindness and love to six children, 14 grandkids and a host of great-grandkids.
In a typical year, we’ll drive down to see her every couple of months. This year, we haven’t visited a single time.
We’ve wanted to. But my mother-in-law is 84 years old and suffers from diabetes. In a state that has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Rio Grande Valley has seen the most severe spread of the virus. We worry about her all the time.
A few times, my wife and I tried talking ourselves into visiting, but we worried that we’d be putting her and other family members — including our 15year-old daughter — at too great a risk.
As a country, we’re fed up with the isolation and disruption that COVID-19 has brought to our lives. We want to convince ourselves that by sheer force of will we can reclaim our old lives and declare the pandemic over.
COVID fatigue has made us irrational. Back in April, when this country was dealing with about 30,000 new cases a day, most of us took it seriously and were diligent about protecting ourselves. Now, with six times that number of daily cases, we should be more careful than ever. But some of us have dropped our guard.
This virus has forced even the luckiest among us to make hard choices, and our Thanksgiving options are particularly tough.
On Nov. 19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a recommendation that Americans stay at home and celebrate Thanksgiving with their immediate families.
The CDC noted that more than 1million COVID cases were reported in this country over the previous week. If people follow their pre-COVID Thanksgiving travel routines, we can expect a major spike in those already awful numbers.
“Travel may increase your chance of getting and spreading COVID-19,” the CDC warned. “Postponing travel and staying home is the best way to protect
yourself and others this year.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading epidemiologist, echoed those concerns in a Friday interview on MSNBC.
“I think the people in this country need to realistically do a risk/benefit assessment,” Fauci said. “Every family is different, everyone has a level of risk that they want to tolerate.”
Fauci added: “Those (holiday gatherings) are the things that have been such joyous things in the past, but this is a very special situation.”
Special, as in painful and heartbreaking.
I lost my mother in 2002 and my father in 2008. For me, visiting Edinburg since then has
not only been a chance to visit my wife’s family, but also to commune with the memory of my parents.
I always make a point of driving by their old house and the places they frequented, just to keep that connection alive.
Growing up, the joy of Thanksgiving came in the small, mundane rituals — such as sitting with my dad and watching his beloved Texas Aggies take on the University of Texas.
In recent years, it’s come from getting to see four generations of my wife’s family members gather around a table to play some highly competitive nickel-a-card lotería, watching my wife and sister-in-law team up over the long weekend to conquer a ridiculously complex jigsaw puzzle and taking my mother-in-law out shopping, where Target hot dogs inevitably will be consumed by everyone.
There’s also my sister-in-law’s green bean casserole and sweet potato casserole, both of which I’m convinced are the best on the planet, and my mother-inlaw’s wonderful stuffing and gravy. And Thursday afternoon usually includes some pumpkin pie in front of the TV, while two of my nephews-in-law playfully argue about the Dallas Cowboys and occasionally try to draw me into the debate.
This coming week, I’m going to miss all those things, just like I’ve missed live music, going to movie theaters, attending Spurs games and all the little things we did without fear, and took for granted.
It’s an unnatural thing to express your love for someone by keeping your distance from them. But COVID-19 has made life unnatural in so many ways.
For everyone who is going to be missing someone during this Thanksgiving, know that there are millions of us there with you, in the same boat.
If we take care to protect the people close to us right now, we should have more to be thankful for at this time next year.