Chasing Grateful
A grievers Thanksgiving
Last night, my adult children, their friends and significant others piled up on the couches, chairs and rug of my 4-season porch like they always do when everyone returns from their respective college towns for the Thanksgiving holiday. I’m not sure why my house became the designated late night gathering spot, but I have been grateful for it for these last few years. I’m always welcomed to their loud reconnection with each other — me perched in a chair in the background of the noise, mostly a listener as tea is spilled, funny memories get shouted and laughter reaches window shaking decibels. Was I this loud in my 20’s? I don’t remember.
I’m thankful for them wanting me there, even though I know some of the better stories get shared after Mom gives up and goes to bed. I’m a cool mom! Just kidding, no pink velour track suit in my closet, and I’m more than fine with that because I have stories I would never share with them either. This is the Way.
I remember last Thanksgiving more vividly now. My youngest son, a Senior in High School, was the only one still living at home, his older sister having departed for her Freshman year in Indiana and his other siblings having been gone longer. He eagerly anticipated everyone’s return, helping me get everything ready for the big meal and excited for the noise to return to the house. His sun rose and set on his brother and sisters, and even though they talked or texted every day, even though Jeff and I tried to more actively fill in the gap to keep him company in their absence, I respected that we were imperfect substitutes.
Thanksgiving Eve was just the same, piles of kids shouting and laughing, him in the thick of it, me going to bed while the rest of them seemed to have the energy to keep it up all night. How he loved that, the prospect of an all-nighter, the permission granted by his older siblings to bend the rules of a house run by old people.
It would be his last Thanksgiving.
Now everything is different. Life is now permanently divided into a before and an after. A shift from when I was happy, whole and hopeful to a permanent survival mode. Slower steps, racing thoughts and the constant bone-deep ache and longing others can’t see which allows me to be only partially present in any conversation. November is the month of thankfulness declarations in the mothers with children set, of which I have been a happy-to-partake member. But the exercise has left me on the sidelines this time, feeling an otherness that is just another unanticipated, unwelcome leg of this child loss road I didn’t know existed.
Everything is supposed to be different all the time because for the last 9 months I wake up every single day to my heart breaking. Everything is supposed to be different.
So, the kids came home again. They piled up on the porch again with their friends, just as loud as ever. They exploded with laughter. And they weaved their brother in and out of the conversation and the stories and the hilarity as if he were piled right in there with them.
They were remembering to me things only siblings would know — his absence breaking their fealty to the secrets of their acknowledged Lord. Having been gifted a square foot plot of land in Scotland by his brother a few years back made his superiority in the sibling hierarchy officially binding and their worship of him that began the day they first met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia is not changed by his departure.
They wanted him there, and so he was.
What you can’t understand about traumatic grief and loss until you are living in it is how incongruous everything will become. We think in absolutes in our lives. We are happy, we are fulfilled, we are broken, we are lost, but those things happen in a linear, forward moving roller coaster and don’t overlap in our minds when things are humming along as they should.
When something explodes that timeline, afterward it gets put back together all wonky. The brokenness overlaps the joy, the thankfulness and the devastation bind together in a rickety bridge to somewhere yet to be understood, but still a destination.
For me, last night, the destination was finding both a deep thankfulness and an overwhelming longing that brought me to my knees. I felt my sweet son more keenly than I have been able to in months and it was wonderful, but I felt the distance between us more acutely, too. I excused myself like I always do, gave some goodnight hugs and made the obligatorily annoying “don’t stay up all night” statement written in my Mom script. Then I went to the only spot in the house I was assured privacy, grabbed a bath towel and screamed and sobbed into it until nothing was left to purge.
Now it is Thanksgiving morning, and its time to start cooking for most of the people I love. I am very grateful for so much in my life at the same time that I recognize how I so desperately wish my life were drastically different. I am lucky I am here to feel all the things I am feeling and to try to make sense of them. I am particularly thankful that I have so many people around me that are willing to help me do it so I don’t have to cross this unstable bridge to somewhere alone. If you are one of those people, thank you. I am blessed by you.
Thanksgiving means something so different to me now, something I’d never have chosen to understand.
But I’ll keep it.
