A special kind of courage to celebrate Thanksgiving
I'm sitting in a beautiful Bridgeport church, waiting for a funeral to begin. I didn't know the man whose life we're celebrating, but I know his daughter and have listened to her stories about her father for years. I always thought of him as a man of great passions, and as the church fills with friends and loved ones, the organ sends to the heavens the first chords of “Day By Day.”
Then then the organist — a longtime family friend — segues into “Let It Be.”
The music is perfect, and I smile. You find smiles where you can in this raggedy year.
We all lost someone in 2022. A couple of our someones simply wandered off. We think they're OK, but we won't know until they resurface. We watched a marriage implode and we were powerless to do more than throw water onto a fire that threatened to melt everything, only our buckets were too small. A few of us awaited the diagnosis of a mole, or a lump. Someone's mental health issues took center stage in such a way we could no longer pretend that loved one is simply quirky. In fact, they're struggling.
The house needed a new roof, and that's not just a metaphorical fillip.
I'm imagine our year was about like yours. Maybe yours was worse, and if that's the case, I'm sorry.
But this week, we will join hands and say grace and not think about the roof or the mole. We will, instead, think about the people whose hands we are holding. And we will think about the people who don't have a table around which to gather, and those who don't have a need for folding chairs to handle the overflow.
Things can always be worse, my husband used to say, until I began to think that was our family motto. I asked him once what he'd say if things actually did arrive at their absolute worse, and without a beat, he said the motto would then change to “Things could always have been worse, sooner.”
Bless him. If you had an afterschool-special kind of childhood, the holidays bring with them an urge to press your nose against the bright window of others' lives and to watch as they smile and toast one another. The light glistens off the crystal and the laugh sounds like Champagne poured over diamonds and you don't feel jealous, precisely. It isn't as if you'd take someone's wonderful life away from them, but more that you'd take their lives and wish for them an even better one. You can make fun of the notion of a Hallmark holiday even while you secretly want to live in a world where all the characters float from one well-appointed house to another, where the plot follows a predictable arc, and the credits roll only when all the nice people are happy (and safely ensconced in a meaningful relationship) and the bad guy gets his.
Or something like that. At this point, we know the credits will roll, but we haven't a clue what's coming at us by way of plot twists beforehand. Should we be worried? On guard? Sit back and wait for all the glittery fun?
You get older, and realize that even the perfect family you watch through the window is dragging something around. That's shouldn't make you feel better, but it might make you feel less lonely. A scar is a scar is a scar, and these past few years have scarred all of us, just a bit. And now we've arrived at a holiday for which most families aren't coming together to celebrate the great year they've had. They're coming together in spite of the year they've had, to serve heaping mounds of food and hold hands while the candles beat back the dark.
That takes a special kind of courage, and maybe it takes some faith, too. I have grandchildren who say Thanksgiving is their favorite holiday, even before Christmas. It's quiet. It's simple. We celebrate the harvest, no matter how thin that harvest may seem. We have food. We have each other, and that is enough.
At the end of the day of her father's funeral, after the service and the fellowship in the church basement, my friend texted to say it had been a good day. I think I know what she means. The church was full of people with whom her father worked and lived, and everyone who spoke told stories in that endearingly halting way of people who aren't accustomed to talking to a crowd. It didn't matter. Their love of the man propelled them into the pulpit, to laugh and get a little choked up as they talked about ball games and political discussions and the question the man would always ask as a greeting: “What are you reading?” From the appreciative sighs of the crowd, I imagine everyone in the sanctuary had similar stories to share. It was a good day.
Bless my friend and her family on this, their first holiday without their dad. Bless you, as well. And happy Thanksgiving.