Giving Thanks for Continuity

11/24/2015

Photo courtesy of Anita Ruthling Klaussen

Uncle Harold is cooking duck, because Barbara always loved it for Thanksgiving.

Since it is Maine, three families have invited him over on Thursday but he wants to be alone, with Barbara, he says. They were together for more than six decades until she died last December. Someone is bringing dessert, and I am sure they will stay a while.

Thanksgiving is for remembering people. My mother-in-law, Mary, who passed early this year, always set a great table and made superb pies the kids still talk about.

I am sure that on Thursday a few of the older grand-daughters will talk about visiting my father in his bedroom on Thanksgiving evening in 1984, and how Pop surveyed the anxiety on their faces and said, “What is this, a death watch?” He passed a few hours later.

The Band played its Last Waltz on Thanksgiving of 1976. We still have the music, and the Scorsese movie, and thanks for that, rocking in my earphones.

Thanksgiving is also for people who are with us. The other day I wished a waiter from Central America “Buen Dia del Pavo” – Happy Turkey Day. He said, “Lo mejor” -- the best.

I give thanks for the higher power who is there for me, for my wife and our children and their children, and for so many friends from Jamaica High and my student-athlete buddies from Hofstra and my writer pals from the round table, thankful that we still meet, and for the people who protect us, including the good man who has gone gray in six years of a brutal job.

And while I am saying thanks, I include the correspondents who enlighten the Comments on my little therapy web site. Every click is part of a community I value.. Thank you.

The New York Times Upshot reassures us that it's okay to eat pie on Thanksgiving.

bruce

11/26/2015 02:09:50 am

George,

hope your thanksgiving is a good one for you and your family.

you guys got it wrong tho. it's supposed to be the second Monday in October, innit?

incidentally, love the plates. they made me think of giverny.

bruce

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12/4/2015 01:44:31 am

Dysentery is an infection that attacks the intestine that causes diarrhea accompanied by blood or mucus.

Michael Berman

12/7/2015 03:38:45 pm

Thank you George, and thanks for you and your "little therapy web site". It's therapy for me.

Michael

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12/11/2015 02:51:00 am

Types or often called typhoid fever also occur due to a bacterial infection Salmonella typhi. Many diseases that afflict children this can endanger life if not handled properly and effectively as soon as possible.

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12/14/2015 01:50:12 am

The trick of lowering body weight in a week is not an element impossible & can do. Along with a little sacrifice, you are able to lose body weight 2.5 kg to 7 kg.

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12/16/2015 01:35:36 am

Haemorrhoids is a swelling that occurs in a rut the rectum. Swelling that contains blood vessels that dilate.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

Giving Thanks for Continuity

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