My absence on the blog this month has been a mix of not enough time and not the right words.
I feel I should focus on my daddy as November marks 13 years of life without him, but none of my new thoughts seem ready to share.
Facebook memories have cycled through previous writings about him, and this past week I kept returning to a post that I typed two Thanksgivings ago. Maybe they are words someone needs to read (again).
Maybe I’m that someone.
I suppose my Novembers will always be colored with shades of sadness.
Still, there’s a lot to be thankful for.
(Originally written and posted to Facebook on November 23, 2018)
I didn’t post anything on Thanksgiving Day because I didn’t feel I had anything meaningful to say. The day marked 11 years since my daddy died (it was Thanksgiving that year, too) but it seemed insincere to acknowledge it because I didn’t experience any particular feelings of grief or loss. My brothers were not able to make it to mom’s house, so while it was an enjoyable day it didn’t feel very holiday.
I sat in my own home last night and watched the trailer for the upcoming live action movie “The Lion King.” A fragment of grief pierced my heart as James Earl Jones (I could listen to him read the phone book, by the way) voiced in familiar Mufasah wisdom:
“A king’s time as ruler rises and falls like the sun. One day the sun will set on my time here…”
The sun set on my daddy’s time more than a decade ago. But our family – his family – still exists.
I have wrestled with and reflected on legacy for almost 2 years. The more I think about it the less I know but I am certain of this: roots matter. They are not just a pathway to our past, buried in the deep underground. They have shaped us into the people we are at this very moment, and they sustain us as we grow and grasp the many good things life brings.
As mom prepared our lunch, she said to me “At least we’re not in a hospital waiting room.”
That’s how we shared the last Thanksgiving daddy was alive. We gathered around a cramped conference room table to eat; daddy lay unconscious in a hospital bed down the hall.
“Yeah, but at least then we were all together,” I said.
“Not all of us,” mom answered, catching me off guard.
“Who was missing?” I asked.
“Abby Kate and Lily,” she said.
Life with my daddy was life without my daughters. If you have both your parents and your children today, celebrate that for the treasure it is.
I don’t know how many more Thanksgivings I will have with my mom in the home where she and daddy raised me but I want to be there – in that little yellow house on Railroad Avenue – for every one God gifts me because y’all, home is a gift.
As 2007 ended, Jeff and I played Scrabble and watched Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. (We’re clearly the party people you all believe us to be.) I didn’t really want to move into 2008. I had my daddy in 2007 and wanted him there even with the hurt and hard of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Eleven years later. Life goes on.
It can be hard to honor tradition and accept change at the same time, especially when change is not what you want. I was reminded this Thanksgiving we don’t have to choose between the two.
Joy exists in both.
I choose joy.
“Praise the Lord. Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good; His love endures forever.”
(Psalms 106:1)
