What Thanksgiving Is As I Grow Older

I’m not presuming to speak for anyone else.

Thanksgiving Day in the central San Luis Valley unfolded into a classic late November afternoon. Bands of gray clouds striped the high, thin film of haze over the sun, and I thought of how October, for all of its morbid associations, is full of color and life compared to the quiet, gray-brown death that is November. The leaves are long gone from the trees. As for those leaves left on the ground, what were once vibrant yellows and reds are dull, crumbling sepia memories, to the dust soon returned.

My wife and I had eaten our dinner. Our son, never one for eating with people, was still sleeping off his intense work week as a trade apprentice. Our daughter would arrive well after dark, having worked that day in Manitou Springs three hours away. Standing alone in the front yard, I recognized the colors and shapes in the sky, the pallor of the sun as the same from 1,800 miles and four decades away. I said “Annelle and Uncle Charley” three times, as if saying so would make them appear. Some of my best childhood memories were from going to their farm in Hartsville, South Carolina, for Thanksgiving in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

As the sun disappeared behind the thicker clouds on the horizon I raised a glass for my late cousin and one-time best friend Ben, who would have been 58 years old that day. Ben’s younger brother Leslie died last year, and the last of one of the finest families to ever walk the Earth was no more. Uncle Joe passed in 2007, Aunt Margie in 2013. Geniuses of mind and spirit, they took an entire way of thinking and doing things with them as they died. I’d need a book to properly eulogize them. 

This month also marks one year since my brother-of-another-mother and one-time best friend Steven Mock passed. I still can’t believe he’s gone. I really wish he was here to read what there is of my third novel. There wouldn’t be a first novel if he hadn’t had given it to me with both critical barrels after reading my prototype first chapter of Bleeding Kansas in 2012.

I’ve got a lot of people I’m missing hard this year. If I’ve had blue moments thinking of the people I miss—and I’ve had, and still do—this is a feature, not a bug of my holiday season. As Dickens observed in his essay, “What Christmas Is As We Grow Older,” we exclude nothing and no one. That means we accept the sadness with the joy. We allow ourselves to mourn our dead even as we cherish those still among us. 

The trick, as always, is in the balance. For instance, I’ve found it’s far easier to mourn silent, invisible dead than it is to cherish living beings with their own things to do and say. The living require so much more of us than a review of fading memories and that overwhelming sadness that comes when you know you’ll never see or speak with them again.

Therefore, you acknowledge those absent loved ones and move on already. There are people downstairs who came a long way to see you. Go see them. While you still can.

I’m sorry to say it’s only been in the last 20 years or so that I’ve come to fully appreciate the stated meaning of Thanksgiving and take it to heart. It was in this year in particular that I finally came to understand on the most essential, sub-molecular level that I might only have so many of these annual observations left. I’ve belabored that point often enough in my Christmas essays, but it’s hitting home all over the calendar for me now.

I could say more. I might say more. I started a memoir of my times going to see Annelle and Uncle Charley, but I realized it was going on too long for online posting purposes, and, as of this writing, I still have a novel to finish.

So, moving right along, then....

I’ve always found this a most haunting image. Is this the night before Thanksgiving? Or are these the survivors gathered the night after, wondering when their turn might yet come?