The food grew cold as my family stared quietly at one another around the dinner table. It was Thanksgiving, eight years ago, and no one knew how to break the silence. Looking back, there was little to be thankful for; I was weeping in a back room and my mother was lying alone in a hospital bed.
It was a hazy fall day and I remember wading through thick piles of burnt-orange leaves in the hospital parking lot. I recall climbing into my grandparents’ minivan, alone, and making my way into the back seat before breaking down. I cried for hours, right through Thanksgiving dinner.
Earlier, five floors up in that cold, sterile building, my mother had taken me by the hand and gracefully cancelled every one of our appointments for the rest of my life: watching me graduate, dancing at my wedding and being present at the births of her grandchildren.
She lived two more weeks before succumbing to ovarian cancer and every Thanksgiving since has felt somewhat dampened to me. And I know that I’m not alone in the pain I feel during the holidays.
At 2:30 A.M. last week, the day before Thanksgiving, a friend of mine called. I’d visited her a week and a half before in Boston, where she was happy. She had escaped Arizona, where we went to high school together, for art school on the East Coast and was loving every minute.
She called me that morning from her home in Sedona to tell me her father had died. Everyone else had gone to sleep and she was having an emotional breakdown all alone.
Her father was a pilot for hire and was taking two elk hunters on a scouting trip that Tuesday. The exact cause of the crash has not yet been identified, but the wreckage of his small Cessna was found high on the Colorado plateau a day later. No one survived.
Her father’s funeral was held in the local high school gymnasium a few days earlier. He had been very active in the community and the gym was filled to capacity. For my friend, the service capped a weeklong whirlwind. I can only imagine how painful it must have been to wait two hours in the airport terminal to take an airplane flight alone only a few days after the crash.
Over the phone, we talked about the mountains of food that the neighbors always donate after a tragedy. Her family had received enough to fill three refrigerators. She had made herself a hot fudge sundae and found a generic romantic comedy to watch in order to pass another sleepless night. Once she had calmed down, I let her go. I told her to call anytime, but we really haven’t spoken since.
I know she must be drowning in all of the advice and pity that the fatherless and motherless receive in buckets. But because of my past experiences, I’ve longed to sit down and write to her, wondering if I have something to offer her now. Although I cannot think of the right tone to write in or the appropriate time to do it, I know almost exactly what I would tell her, or at least what my message would be: that parents never leave their children, for better or for worse, and though her father’s physical remains have long since been interred, she can still find him.
How do I know this? I don’t, really. For the longest time, I couldn’t recognize it, but every night since my mother’s death, in those odd moments between waking and sleep, I could sense her. Now, even at my loneliest, with my eyes closed I can see her. Lying down, I can feel her as a tingle in my back and, every so often, I shed a tear before losing consciousness.
If my friend doesn’t want to be alone, she doesn’t have to be. If nothing else, I hope that she can quickly come to grasp with that, something that it took me years to understand. She knows what her father would say to her in those moments of despair. She knows what her father’s love felt like.
