The last time I had Thanksgiving at home was in 2009, the year my mother passed away. I returned from her funeral and the attendant ceremonies (traditions I wrote about in an essay for Narrative, much later), and realized that there were certain obligations I had kept that I just could not stomach. I think there are times in our lives when the large things – big losses, big loves – put everything else in perspective. This was one of them. To me, losing my mother was equal to having children. Those who could not handle the grief of the former or the joy of the latter were, essentially, diminished in my eyes, not just then but forever after.
Perhaps that is judgemental and unforgiving, but I don’t think so. My avowal to stop supporting the ACLU came when I realized they condone the right of the Westboro Baptist “Church,” to protest at funerals. It’s simple. The right to free speech ends where the right to grief begins. And no manifesto should ever trump that. Similarly, nothing should ever stop a person from reaching out to someone who has suffered a loss, particularly the loss of a mother. And surely, no human being can remain unmoved by the birth of a child. These are the basic instincts that make us human: the ones that makes people run into traffic without a second thought, to save someone else’s kid from getting hit by a car, the ones that makes people stop by a dying person, no matter who they are, so they will not die alone. There is simply no excuse for not being able to lend a hand. “I don’t know what to say,” seems like such an inadequate sentence. If birth and death do not move a person hard enough to step out of what feels “comfortable,” then what does?
Hmm. I am not sure this was what I meant to write. I had meant to write about Thanksgiving, and staying at home…but I’ll keep following this thought.
That Thanksgiving, in 2009, I attempted to cook a turkey because that is what one is supposed to do and oh, I was mightily skilled at doing what was expected of me. I put that damned bird in the oven and went on a walk where I raged and wept, but I came home and rolled nutmeats in cocoa-powder (rum balls for dessert!), and attempted to create a same-but-different Thanksgiving. We gathered around a table, a group that included my father who had left and returned with me after my mother’s funeral, and I served the food on platters that belonged to my grand-mother, my grand-mother-in-law (who had always treated me like family), and my mother, and I said something about that, about those platters belonging to and gifted by the women who had raised and guided me. Then we sat down and ate a bird that tasted like reconstituted cardboard, and stuffing with too much salt, and we pretended all was well with the world.
This year was another year when I decided that I would do what I felt like doing, not what I was supposed to do. Many things have contributed to making it a far easier choice to make. I am older, and I am deeply aware of how close I am to having only one tenuous hold, my father, on the people and histories that make me who I am, that when he is no more, I will float unanchored and lost in a cold country. I am conscious, more than ever before, that the obligations I have kept have been to people who have never seen me for who I am, not loved me for where I’m from, not ever understood me, nor cared to try. I have come to see that I had, like Mr. Flynn in the musical, ‘Chicago,’ created a lot of “razzle-dazzle,” and “flim-flam-flourish,” in order to conceal the reality of the immense and overwhelming loneliness that comes from being far from people who love me, from my parents most of all.
This Thanksgiving, I was able to say, fuck the bloody turkey. I hate turkey, and I’m done eating it. I was able to say I would cook whatever the hell I damn well pleased, and invite the people I wanted to share life with: good friends who take me as I am, who share a multitude of pleasures and interests, but are fully themselves, distinct and different and inaccessible in significant ways, but still always present, with their own flaws and fallibilities, people whose children I absolutely adore. I was happy to receive a loving message from my dearest friend, Charles, who has never once forgotten to send such notes to me on all the important times – the times when we are most likely to forget everyone in the midst of festivities like Thanksgiving and New Years and Mothers Days – and I was happy to send one along to a new friend who has come into my life, to where she was, enjoying Thanksgiving with her love and his family. I was able to hear news of other dear friends moving to the West Coast, to be happy for them, knowing that the ties of friendship will not loosen with distance, in the same way the ties of friendship with those and other good friends did not loosen with our own moves to Maine and back. And though the candles that usually line my dining table burned one of the beautifully penned name-cards, and part of the table-cloth, and the table too, I was still happy. Table cloths, name-cards, tables, who cares in the end? The faces of those who gathered, who they are, and who and what they have been to me and mine, they are what heal and lighten my heart.
Thank God for the families we create, for the ones who find us, and take us into theirs.
p.s. The lamb kicked arse.
