Empty seats, delivered feasts mark holiday
Vivian Zayas can’ t keep herself from scrolling through photos of last Thanksgiving, when her mother stood at the stove to make a big pot of rice and beans and then took a seat at the edge of the table.
That was before anyone had heard of COVID-19 and before it claimed the retired seamstress. Ana Martinez died at 78 on April 1 while recovering at a nursing home from a knee replacement.
The family had its traditional meal of turkey, yams, green beans and rice and beans — but Zayas removed a seat from the table at her home in Deer Park, New York, this year and put her mother’s walker in its place as a reminder of the loss.
“It’s a painful Thanksgiving. You don’t even know, should you celebrate?” asked Zayas. “It’s a lonely time.”
Americans marked the Thanksgiving holiday amid an unrelenting pandemic that has claimed the lives
of more than a quarter of a million people in the United States.
Turkey and pies still came out ovens, football was still on TV, families will gave thanks. But this holiday has been utterly altered after months filled with sorrows and hardships: Many feasts are weighed down by the loss of loved ones; others have been canceled or scaled back with the virus surging.
Zoom and FaceTime calls have become a fixture at dinner tables to connect with family members who
don’t want to travel. Far fewer volunteers are helping at soup kitchens or community centers. A Utah health department has been delivering boxes of food to residents who are infected with the virus and can’t go to the store. A New York nursing home is offering drive-up visits for families of residents struggling with celebrating the holiday alone.
“The holidays make it a little harder,” said Harriet Krakowsky, 85, a resident of the Hebrew Home at Riverdale in New York who misses the big Thanksgiving celebrations of years past and has lost neighbors and friends to the virus.
“I cry, but I get over it. We have to go on,” she said.
From start to finish, Thanksgiving is different this year for Jessica Franz, a nurse who works the graveyard shift at Olathe Medical Center, in Kansas.
For one, Franz, 39, is celebrating without her motherin-law, Elaine Franz, who died of the coronavirus Nov. 10, one day before her 78th birthday. In previous years, her mother-in-law, who was Mennonite, would lay out a spread for her children and grandchildren. In a typical year, co-workers would bring food for a potluck.
None of that is happening this year.
The family is shifting the festivities to Zoom and FaceTime. It’s been hard for her daughters — ages, 2, 8 and 11. Her middle daughter was exposed to the coronavirus at school and is quarantined until Dec. 3, and her oldest daughter is struggling with the concept of a scaled-back holiday.